Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  “There’s something I don’t get, Trevor. The more money flows into this program, the more activist groups sprout up. It’s not logical!”

  “Of course it’s logical,” said Spooky.

  “How so?”

  “Just follow the money. . . .” Spooky liked to let his most intriguing statements hang in the air and watch me try to make sense of them. “Look at who funds them,” he finally added.

  Well, I didn’t have time to do that. I had Reuters calling me about the price of crude oil for next month, a briefing note for Kofi Annan to write up, a weekly press release to send out, and my director’s office to manage. Besides, the anti-sanctions activists were not exactly listing the sources of their funding on their websites. Some of them surely had legitimate sources of funding. But how much “grassroots” support money could be raised for this cause by throwing keg parties at campuses? Some groups managed to travel all over the Middle East, put up elaborate websites, and produce a range of documentaries and other media materials. Where was this money coming from?

  Years later, it would take sixty international investigators nineteen months to unravel the extensive network of support groups Saddam Hussein was able to set up around the world, using the very same resources we were trying to make available to the Iraqi people.

  The story of one priest, Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, certainly shed some light on the question that was preoccupying me that morning. From 1991 to 1994, Father Benjamin worked as an assistant to the Vatican state secretary, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. In 1997, just as the Oil-for-Food program was getting started, Father Benjamin began to campaign against the sanctions. During his visit to Iraq in 1998, he became friendly with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, the sole Christian member of Saddam’s cabinet. (Deputy prime minister was a somewhat misleading title for the man whose principal task was to lead Iraq’s propaganda war effort.) At the time, Father Benjamin was producing a documentary called Iraq: The Birth of Time, which would probably have become a box-office smash hit had the birth of time been traced to 1932, the year a piece of Mesopotamia was carved out of the Ottoman Empire and slapped with the name Iraq.

  In 1999, Father Benjamin founded the Benjamin Committee for Iraq. Political campaigning was rather new for a man who had spent most of his extracurricular activities to date composing music and writing lyrical books. Father Benjamin was also a performer, playing the piano, the guitar, and on occasion the electronic keyboards, making spectacular, though brief, forays into the glam world of religious disco.

  In April 2000, the flamboyant Father Benjamin decided to risk his life for the Iraqi people by becoming a passenger on an unauthorized (but highly publicized) flight from Rome to Baghdad that purposefully defied the UN embargo. Anti-sanctions activists were multiplying these kinds of publicity stunts even though Iraqi ministers complained in private that they didn’t quite know what to do with much of the random supplies these activists brought with them to “save Iraqi lives,” since they didn’t fit into the normal distribution chain and, again, because Iraq was already receiving more humanitarian goods than Saddam cared to spend money on. In some cases, highly publicized humanitarian flights came in with expired medicine.

  But the do-gooders were quite impressed with themselves nonetheless. In 2001 Tariq Aziz expressed his appreciation for Father Benjamin’s “prodigious efforts to establish the principles of justice and right.” Benjamin even made a public declaration that he had “the Pope’s blessing” for going on this trip to Iraq. Did he really? One thing is certain. No man of morals would have blessed what happened next.

  Meet Alain Bionda, a businessman representing companies seeking to break into the Iraqi crude oil market. After trying several times to approach the Iraqi oil minister to get a contract, Bionda was informed that in order to do business with Iraq, he had to find a man who would introduce him to Tariq Aziz. Bionda looked and looked but found nobody who could make the introduction. But then one night, an Iraqi friend of Bionda’s (who requested anonymity when he later testified to investigators) had an idea. He told Bionda that he had once met a priest named Father Benjamin, who in turn had met with Aziz several times and seemed, well, friendly to the government.

  At that point, Bionda could have asked his friend, “What are the chances that a priest would intervene on behalf of an oil trader like myself?” But he didn’t. Something told him that his luck was about to turn with Father Benjamin, and so he asked his anonymous friend to arrange for a meeting with the ordained priest.

  It wouldn’t be long before the two men concocted a plan to make some cash off the Oil-for-Food program. Father Benjamin thought that the most proper way to proceed would be to involve Pope Jean Paul II himself in their scheme. In 2001 Father Benjamin asked Bionda to deliver a letter from the Pope to Aziz, the idea being that if Bionda came highly recommended, with a letter from the Pope, Aziz might be impressed. One has to hope that Pope Jean Paul II didn’t actually write this letter himself, or at least that he did not know what use Father Benjamin and his new business partner would have for it. Either way, Bionda felt anxious going to Iraq alone with a letter from the Pope. After all, he was an oil trader, not a courier for the Vatican. So he asked Father Benjamin to accompany him to see Aziz. The priest would hand over the letter from the Pope, and, as the investigation later revealed, Bionda would “solicit Mr. Aziz for an oil allocation.” All in one fell swoop.

  When this odd couple appeared before Tariq Aziz in 2001, with their letter from the Pope and their demand for underpriced Iraqi oil, they tried as best they could not to make it look as if they had any business relationship with each other. So when it came time for Bionda to request an oil allocation, Father Benjamin might well have been examining his nails.

  Aziz’s eyes had a certain Garfield quality to them, especially when he became suspicious of his interlocutors. They’d slide back and forth under half-closed eyelids even as he remained politely silent. Did these jokers think he was born yesterday? Clearly, as far as Aziz was concerned, the two men were in business, and that was how the transaction would be recorded in Iraq’s Oil Ministry records.

  Following the meeting among Aziz, Bionda, and Father Benjamin, an allocation of two million barrels of oil was granted in Father Benjamin’s name and sold to Bionda. Years later, in 2005, Father Benjamin and Bionda would both vehemently deny to investigators that the priest expected anything in return for facilitating this transaction. But investigators found that after he cashed in on his Iraqi oil deal, Bionda transferred $140,000 to Father Benjamin’s account at UBS Geneva on December 27, 2001. In defending his action, Bionda explained that he felt a “moral obligation” to pay the priest for his help. The same day, Father Benjamin transferred $90,000 to another account he held at the Vatican Bank; and from that account, he withdrew $20,150 in cash.

  I wonder how Father Benjamin felt about himself as he walked around the streets of Rome with twenty grand in his pockets. His cash had been ripped off the humanitarian program illegally, and he understood this. His total commission of $140,000 could buy a lot of Tylenol for Iraq’s ailing inpatients. And maybe, just maybe, such a thought eventually occurred to him, because further evidence shows that he may actually have felt some remorse. In January 2002, when he was offered an additional oil allocation to support “his activities in favor of the Iraqi population,” Father Benjamin told Aziz, both in person and by letter, that he could not accept any more oil. Investigators found that Oil Ministry records confirmed this new pious stance. Further allocations were made to Father Benjamin for 5.5 million barrels, but the priest never made use of them. His friend Bionda, however, continued his lucrative trade right up to the start of the Iraq War in 2003, graciously accepting the allocation that had been given to Father Benjamin. And no evidence emerged that he continued to feel a “moral obligation” to pay his holy friend further commissions.

  After the invasion of Iraq, Father Benjamin sent an “open letter” to his friend Tariq Aziz, who now sat in jail in Baghdad.
In his letter (which is very long but very entertaining, and is available at Father Benjamin’s website at www.benjaminforiraq.org), the priest recalled “a time when everyone wanted to see” the talented Mr. Aziz.

  From all over the world, politicians, figures from the worlds of science, of culture, of the arts and of the media, leaders of political parties, of associations and others wanted to see you. [Oddly, he doesn’t mention oil traders.] Since your arrest, many of them have not spoken a word to defend you, but there remain many others who are ready to do so. The witnesses for your defense will not only be lawyers, but also high-ranking political figures, even several Ministers currently in power, ambassadors, Nobel prize winners, artists, doctors, men of religion, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and of other faiths, as well as writers and journalists.

  Aziz could read the priest’s plea between the lines of purple prose: please don’t rat us out, and we’ll come to your aid! But Aziz would talk to investigators, all right. And talk. And talk. And all the influential people Father Benjamin was referring to in his letter would be unable to come to his aid, because they would come under investigation themselves.

  Not everyone investigated was guilty, for example, in the late 1990s, George Galloway became an outspoken critic of the sanctions in the British Parliament. But he did more than just follow a fashionable trend. He actually decided to help one very cute little Iraqi child. In 1998 Galloway became chairman of the Mariam Appeal, an organization established with the honorable intention of providing medical treatment to Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old girl who suffered from leukemia, just like the girl we had met at the Baghdad hospital who ended up dying on Christmas Day.

  Galloway’s organization helped little Mariam by financing a trip for her to a London Hospital, where she received treatment that was unavailable in Iraq. But her treatment cost just a fraction of the money that was raised. The Mariam Appeal used the rest of the money for a much broader political campaign against the sanctions in Iraq. It funded a fancy ten-country bus tour on a London double-decker, which Galloway used as a pro-Iraq publicity stunt. A film was made of this epic voyage. Here’s a flier invitation to the film’s opening night:

  LAUNCH OF THE MARIAM APPEAL BIG BEN TO BAGHDAD BUS FILM 16 NOVEMBER 2000

  The Arab Club of Britain is hosting the premiere showing of

  the Mariam Appeal film “Big Ben to Baghdad”:

  the epic journey through three continents, ten countries and 15,000 miles

  from London to Baghdad in an antique double-decker London Routemaster bus.

  The film will be shown at the Brunei Theatre at the School of Oriental and

  African Studies (SOAS), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1 at

  6.30 p.m. on Thursday, 16th November, 2000.

  Admission free but donations are welcome

  FOLLOWING THE PREMIERE, VHS COPIES OF THE 60-MINUTE FILM

  WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE SPECIAL PRICE OF £9.99!!

  In all, Galloway’s foundation received more than £1 million in donations. One of the contributors, Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman, was found by investigators to have funneled money to the Appeal through a complex network of middlemen who profited illegally from Iraq’s oil sales.

  According to investigators, Zureikat got four oil allocations from Saddam and subsequently deposited £448,000 into the Mariam Appeal foundation. Zureikat was also found to have paid kickbacks into Saddam’s bank account in Jordan.

  Galloway described the evidence that linked him to Zureikat’s oil transactions as fabrications—a “cock and bull story,” he wrote in an e-mail to the independent inquiry that investigated his deeds. “I had nothing to do with any oil deals of Mr. Zureikat or anyone else,” he said.

  Oh, well. At least a little girl got treatment. But how many more kids might have been assisted with the money that was kicked back to Saddam?

  Denis Halliday’s resignation gave a jolt to the groups lobbying for a lifting of the sanctions. Suddenly, they felt they could achieve their goal. In reality, anti-sanctions activists stood zero chance of lifting the sanctions—which, by then, only really applied to military or “dual-use” hardware. Saddam clearly knew this. So long as he was in power, there would be no circumstance under which the sanctions could be fully lifted. But his propaganda war kept pressure on the United Nations and swayed a lot of honorable people to his cause. People like Denis Halliday were not corrupt. And hundreds of young activists who took time out of their schedules to demonstrate against us were not corrupt either. But ultimately, it came down to this: allowing Saddam Hussein to import new tanks was not the way to save Iraqi children.

  Saddam’s corruption-fueled propaganda machine did manage something important for the Iraqi regime. It put UN workers like me on the defensive. Instead of keeping an eye on Saddam’s financial transactions, we spent our time trying to defend ourselves against the charge that we were “committing genocide in Iraq.”

  Nobody at the United Nations dared to challenge Halliday’s statement that the United Nations, and specifically the United States, could “be blamed for crimes against humanity, including possibly genocide.” His resignation was not effective immediately. He took the time to do a few victory laps with his friends in the Iraqi regime before leaving the country. The thirty-eighth floor watched Halliday tear away at the UN’s reputation without saying a word.

  Back when Halliday was on payroll, Pasha had tried to call him back to order, but Halliday treated Pasha’s faxes the same way Pasha had treated Halliday’s no-smoking signs. Then, on the day that his resignation (finally) took effect, Halliday received a flowery letter from Kofi Annan thanking him for his distinguished service to the United Nations and promising to ask for his assistance again in the future.

  This left those among us who had not resigned a bit confused as to the nature of our mission. Were we supposed to resign, too? Or were we supposed to carry on with our “genocidal” program?

  Annan chickened out when it came to defending our mission in public. And Pasha couldn’t articulate his words well enough to get on the air. I figured that before we could have a coherent public relations strategy, we needed to be clear, inside the UN, on where we stood. Either we were doing the right thing or we were doing the wrong thing and should all resign.

  The appointment of Hans von Sponeck to replace Halliday had initially given me hope that we might, at a minimum, stop feeding Saddam’s propaganda effort against us. Von Sponeck came across as a disciplinarian. Our mission had to be restructured to monitor an increasing flow of oil and goods into Iraq. But the four-day war of 1998, and Pasha’s failure to get von Sponeck and his staff out of Baghdad in time, had left the operation deeply divided, once again. At the working level, employees from New York and Baghdad could sometimes manage to collaborate. But such teamwork had to occur under the radar.

  Soon after Operation Desert Fox, during which Pasha hung up on von Sponeck, it became clear that the German would probably resign on the Cypriot. What I did not expect from von Sponeck was that he intended to go the same way as Halliday and accuse the UN of conducting a “criminal” policy in Iraq. The resignation of yet another high-level UN official, on February 14, 2000, would completely paralyze our operation once again. Hans von Sponeck announced his decision to resign several months before it would take effect, which essentially meant he remained in a position of management and authority even after his resignation “in protest” over the sanctions had been announced.

  Normally, when someone resigns from his post in a foreign ministry, his resignation takes effect immediately, or within a few weeks at most. He does not remain on payroll for several months and use his position to undermine the entire mission while completely desisting from doing his job. Instead of allowing von Sponeck to stay at his post once his intention to resign had been blasted all over the media, Annan should have accepted his resignation, “effective immediately,” and replaced him with someone who was interested in managing the thousands of staff we had in I
raq and New York. Instead of taking action, the team around Annan looked on passively as the largest operation under his watch was coming apart at the seams.

  At one stage, Pasha managed to recruit a competent spokesperson. John Mills was a former reporter for Australian television and radio, a real news-man, a writer, and a storyteller, who had successfully reconverted his career as a much-sought-after UN spokesperson. John had a beautiful wife who worked for UNICEF, great kids, and a healthy life outside the office—proof, which I sorely needed, that one could pursue an interesting UN career without completely losing one’s mind.

  Mills arrived at the office like a breath of fresh air. He had all sorts of plans to improve our image. He immediately set out to design a website and a series of media statements that aimed to counter Saddam Hussein’s anti-UN propaganda. He made contact with every member of the UN press corps and went for briefings with every senior manager in the office before finally ending up at my doorstep, slightly off balance, asking me if I had time for lunch.

  Pasha was refusing to sign the op-ed piece Mills had written for him, people were refusing to feed him information for his website, and the UN field mission in Baghdad had begun calling him a spy.

  “Welcome on board,” I said.

  We sat down at the cafeteria, and I drew him a map of the conflicts (ideological, bureaucratic, and personal) that permeated the operation.

  “Shit, where have I landed?” Mills asked, suddenly all depressed.

  We were back at square one. In the many months it took Hans von Sponeck to resign, Mills became very ill. He had passed out one day after lunch and had not been seen in the office since. I was not told what ailed him, but I realized it was serious when I was suddenly asked by Pasha to once again serve as the “acting spokesman” for the program.