Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  “Well, the briefing is about what progress we’ve made,” I said.

  “Yes . . . and?” Christer didn’t get it.

  “Well, the thing is, we haven’t made any progress,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Christer, sitting down. “The invitation mentions a promise we made to the Council over a year ago!”

  I knew that only too well, since I was in charge of updating the famous Status Sheet tracking our progress. In this case, we had promised the Council to dramatically improve on our so-called observation mechanism in Iraq, in return for their tripling the money available to Iraq under the program.

  Now, to begin with, we hardly had an “observation mechanism” to speak of. What we had was a bunch of guys riding around in cars with their Iraqi minders and reporting whatever the officials were telling them—that is, when these officials were in a mood to answer their questions.

  Everybody remembers the footage of the weapons inspectors going out on inspections only to be blocked or stalled by their Iraqi minders. Such incidents, when videotaped, usually led to crises between Iraq and the international community. But our humanitarian observers never made a big deal out of being blocked. As a result, they were blocked all the time. They would simply be told, “Don’t go there” or “Don’t report on that,” and they would comply. So what the world saw on television was weapons inspectors whipping out camcorders to show the Iraqi regime’s stalling tactics on the issue of the weapons of mass destruction. What people did not get to see was how the UN system turned a blind eye to the government’s mistreatment of its citizens through blatant political discrimination in the distribution of the humanitarian goods it was allowed to buy under our program.

  How could we report that the Oil-for-Food program had ensured equitable distribution of medicines when it was clear to everybody that the hospitals in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit had their stocks full and the hospitals in the Shiite south remained chronically underprovisioned? How could we report that food was distributed equitably when we knew full well that entire chunks of Iraq’s population, like the Marsh Arabs, were being denied ration cards? We participated in the cover-up because we spent most of our time quibbling among ourselves. In the case of the observers, they were split into three units, and the greatest concern of each unit was to know what the others were observing, in case it contradicted their own findings. In effect, our observers were observing one another instead of observing the Iraqis.

  The job of the UN observers was by no means easy. But it did not help that our senior managers in Baghdad basically disagreed with the mandate the Security Council had given them. After working for two successive heads of mission who openly disagreed with the sanctions, our observers had become used to acting as advocates for the lifting of the sanctions instead of actually keeping count of what goods went where. This was made evident to me when I first had the opportunity to meet with the observers in Baghdad in November 1997.

  I had expected an orderly briefing on their activities and was treated instead to something akin to an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. The observers—about forty of them—were sitting like audience members in a room, and Pasha, Halliday, and I were on a panel. Pasha made a depressing introductory statement about the thankless job they had and then opened the floor for questions. That’s when the show started in earnest.

  One after the other, the observers took to the microphone and made grand declarations against the United States, the Security Council, and, most important, their rivals within the UN mission itself, whom they referred to as “some people.” Each intervention was interrupted with clapping or booing. Most of them talked about the frustrations involved in their work, and some concluded their remarks by calling for a lifting of the sanctions, which inevitably got them a round of applause. This was a far cry from the crack team of expert monitors envisaged by London and Washington when they first drew up their plans for the Oil-for-Food program. Our guys were a mixed bag of humanitarian workers, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, who did their best to adapt to this most unusual mission. Nonetheless, these were the people we had to work with.

  When they weren’t riding around in cars, our observers were engaged in bitter turf wars that made basic information-sharing between them impossible. Pasha had promised the Security Council we would establish a unified database that would act as a repository for all relevant humanitarian information, but the distrust among the UN agencies made such a project impossible to deliver on. It did not help that two of our observation units—one headed by a Frenchman who spoke no English and the other by an Englishman with a stiff upper lip—hated each other with a vengeance and were, in turn, hated by the UN agency heads in Baghdad, whose observation duties overlapped with their own. They all accused one another of changing their reports. Among the observers themselves, an ethnic rivalry had developed between the “Arabs” and the “Africans”—who together formed a majority of our observer pool. It should perhaps be explained to outside observers that Arab racism toward Africans is generally far less clouded in political correctness than the racism that exists in Western cultures. In Arabic, the word that describes black people is the same word that describes servants. This, in addition to the overlapping responsibilities assigned to different observers and the stress they were under from the Iraqi regime, contributed to making our so-called observation mechanism a gargantuan mess.

  After expanding the program, the Security Council had asked us to double the number of our observers on the ground in Iraq. This should have been easy, as it was just a matter of recruitment. Unfortunately, the UN recruitment system was organized in such a way that no single person had responsibility for it. Thus, at each step in the bureaucratic process, a tiny drop of bad will (of which we had bucketloads) would cause the whole system to grind to a complete halt. This meant that it took us up to a year to recruit and deploy an observer to Iraq. The most qualified people would usually not wait that long, which meant that we would have to start all over again with a new, less qualified candidate. Our budgeted posts were never filled, and we never functioned at full capacity. Not for a single day did we have all of our observers deployed on the ground in Iraq. So, while on paper we had promised an increase in the number of our observers, their number had in fact decreased through sheer bureaucratic attrition.

  This last fact had caused me to rush into Cindy’s office during the week when my new director was still settling in to explain that we needed to get our act together on the recruitment of observers or else look like fools in front of the Security Council. Clearly, this gave her an idea.

  According to protocol, briefings to the Security Council were to be delivered by the highest official in charge, which meant that Pasha should have been the one to go and look like a fool. But Pasha was increasingly traveling, and Cindy had managed to arrange the briefing at a time when Pasha would be out of the office, so that Smiley Face would be the one to end up on the hot seat. There was a real risk that Smiley Face would lose all credibility with the UN Security Council on his first appearance, and this would allow Cindy to sideline him (and our whole division) more easily afterward.

  “So what am I supposed to tell the Council?” asked Christer, now livid.

  “We’re going to have to tell them the truth,” I said.

  “But, I mean . . .” He twitched nervously while looking for words.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll put it in UN-ese for you.”

  If history were written in UN-ese, the battle of Waterloo might be considered a French military success. UN-ese usually includes a lot of sentences without an active subject: “all efforts must be made, all precautions should be taken, issues must be identified and remedies ought to be found, etc. . . .” By whom and how? one might ask. And the answer would usually be “by all concerned” and “in consultation with all relevant authorities.”

  Nonetheless, there was a limit to how good an impression we could give of the situation. Besides, we had a responsibility to be h
onest and forthright with the Security Council. The advantage Christer had was that he was new, and so I decided to go easy on the UN-ese and actually send him in with a straightforward briefing. Instead of saying the situation was dandy, we would come in and say it was less than satisfactory. This, I hoped, would reverse the nature of the meeting from one where we got grilled to one where we would do our mea culpa. In order to defuse possible criticism, I also called some key aides at some of the missions and made a case for them to go easy on my new director. The aides bought my pitch, and Christer was able to deliver his briefing to a receptive audience.

  Christer told them there were serious problems with our observation mechanism and that he would endeavor to fix them as a matter of priority. Above the table, Christer’s delivery was good. Below the table, his foot was dancing salsa. He had good reason to be nervous, for at that point he had only a limited understanding of the realities on the ground.

  Christer’s briefing was a success. He appeared honest, articulate, and committed to doing a better job. The ambassadors did not rip into him, as Cindy had hoped they would. Instead, they wished him good luck.

  After the briefing, I passed Cindy in the corridor and thanked her, on my boss’s behalf, for the “opportunity” to brief the Security Council. That was UN-ese for “Bring it on, bitch!”

  But Cindy knew exactly how to spin the meeting to Pasha. When the big boss returned to the office, she told him that Christer had criticized the operation in front of the Security Council. Pasha’s reaction was to block Christer from any further interaction with the Council. The turf war between Smiley Face and Cindy was engaged.

  I decided to appeal directly to Pasha, but much to my surprise, I found it really hard to get a meeting with him. His secretary treated me as if I was a stranger all of a sudden, and I had to schedule an appointment like everyone else.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Just tell him I need to speak with him. That it’s important. He’ll call me when he has a moment.” But Pasha never got in touch. What the hell was going on?

  A week later, we received a memo. The entire Program Management Division was ordered to move out of the building at One UN Plaza and over to the Daily News Building on Forty-Second Street. In UN terms, that was like sending us to Antarctica.

  With the memo in hand, I walked into Pasha’s office without taking an appointment. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t my decision,” said Pasha. “We’re running out of space, and the Daily News Building was the only place available. It’s a temporary thing. . . .”

  “Did Cindy talk you into this?”

  “Look, give me a facking break with Cindy. At least she comes to me with solutions. With your boss, it’s always problems.”

  Surely, Pasha meant to say “decisions.” Christer needed Pasha to make decisions, yes. And the last decision he needed Pasha to make was a pretty important one, too.

  Christer had received a call one day from a Swedish company that was negotiating a contract to sell trucks to Iraq. The Iraqis were demanding the traditional 10 percent kickback payment, but the Swedish CEO hesitated and called Christer for advice. Christer went into a panic when he received the call. He wrote Pasha a confidential memo about the incident and advised that we should inform the Security Council that we had concrete evidence of Saddam Hussein’s fraud.

  Pasha exploded.

  “Enough with all this hoolabaloo!” That’s how he referred to the kickbacks. “We’re not facking Sherlock Holmes! We can’t investigate every case we hear about! This is none of your facking business!”

  To my director and me, failure to advise the Security Council constituted a failure to do our job, and we said so very clearly in e-mail communications to other colleagues. When word of this got back to Pasha, he got even angrier, and decided to blame Christer for “bad-mouthing” him.

  Though Cindy generally agreed with me on the substance and also felt we should advise the Security Council of the kickback issue, she used Pasha’s anger with Christer to play for advantage in our ongoing turf war. Instead of helping us persuade Pasha to do the right thing, she confirmed his belief that we were out to undermine him. And after that, it was only child’s play to convince him to move our division to Antarctica.

  Pasha seemed increasingly suspicious of just about everyone in the office and seemed to go along with anything Cindy wanted him to do. He seemed increasingly aloof, often traveling to Geneva or Lebanon without warning.

  “What are you going to Geneva for?” Christer asked him at a staff meeting.

  “None of your goddamn business,” Pasha said.

  It turned out that there was a meeting of OPEC ministers in Geneva. What was Pasha doing hobnobbing with the world’s oil traders? I suppose he had become sort of an oil producer himself. Take away the UN Oil-for-Food program, and the oil markets would lose access to the second-largest oil reserves on the planet. This gave Pasha some cachet in the corridors of the oil conference. He liked being around influential people, and I rationalized, at the time, that merely networking was reason enough for him to travel around so much. Had I paused to think about this, I would probably have begun to ask myself more questions. But my mind was primarily focused on problems closer to home. I would sometimes wonder if there was really anybody at the wheel of this gigantic operation we were supposed to be running. Kofi Annan probably assumed that his deputy, Louise Fréchette, had the situation under control. And she probably assumed that Pasha was in charge. Or at least that Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, had him under control. Pasha, in turn, was content to let Cindy sit in the control room. We might have done a fine job together, Cindy and I, had she not felt a compulsive need to eradicate my division from the office map. But the internal battles she was waging (and now winning) were probably the best reason she had to wake up in the morning. And the morning on which we were scheduled to pack up and move out of the main office was a glorious one for her.

  As we packed up to move, Cindy walked around the office snickering. She walked into Christer’s corner office, even as he was leaving with a box in his hands, and started moving around the furniture. As soon as he was out of earshot, she stepped out and declared, “Good riddance!” loud enough for the rest of the office to hear.

  To further ensure that the Program Management Division could no longer function coherently, Cindy sabotaged our e-mail system by ordering the IT guy to provide us with slower-than-dial-up-speed access to our mailboxes. The system she had “approved” for us crashed about four times a day, and for three weeks we couldn’t communicate with our mission in the field or with the rest of the UN offices in New York. Finally, she ordered the secretaries who worked for Pasha to bar us from access to the files in his office. I don’t know what kind of threats they were under to comply with this order, but one day, after I picked up a report I needed to refer to in a meeting, one of the secretaries literally ran after me.

  She was a sweet woman from Madagascar. I had previously helped her son apply to a good high school, and we were on excellent terms. I didn’t notice her following me out of the office. I hadn’t even imagined that borrowing the file might be an issue, and she was a very small person, so it was difficult for her to catch up with me as I was hurrying to a meeting. She followed me for several blocks, all the way over to the Daily News Building, before I finally noticed someone shouting my name. I turned around and saw her running toward me.

  “Hey, darling, what’s going on? Are you all right?” I asked after she caught up.

  “Cindy said no files should leave the office,” she said, still struggling to catch her breath.

  “And you followed me all the way here?” I asked.

  “She’ll kill me!” she said, physically begging for the file with her hands.

  “But . . . I mean, we still work in the same office, right?” I said. “My office here is still part of ‘the office.’ It’s just two different locations, that’s all. I’m sure Cindy didn’t mean that only she and Pasha co
uld have access to the files—how are we supposed to work?”

  “Please, Michael. . . .” she pleaded, wild-eyed, with sweat dripping from her forehead.

  Wow. The poor woman was scared. It was no use arguing with her—she didn’t make the rules. She was just a foot soldier in Cindy’s growing empire of paranoia. Or perhaps it was Pasha’s. It was hard to tell what the power dynamic was between them. Was she manipulating the big boss or was she simply doing his bidding? One way or the other, the department that was officially supposed to “manage” the program in New York was physically and irrevocably cut off from the information flow of Pasha’s office.

  We wondered how we were supposed to do our work until it became crystal clear that the less we did, the happier Pasha and Cindy were. Pasha never visited our office and never called us over. If he sent us any communication at all, it was to further restrict our responsibilities. Pasha and Cindy’s master plan would become clear a year later, when they would request a surprise audit of the Program Management Division.

  “What have these bozos done to manage the program?” Pasha would ask the auditors.

  This was a classic UN battle plan. Restrict the powers of an office, then attack it for not achieving anything. We would come to the office in the morning, complain all day, and go home at night. People started drinking more than was reasonable at lunch, and there were so many prescription drugs circulating in the office that we could have opened a pharmacy. More than half of the people in the office had some kind of back problem, which was a testament to our collective bad chakra. When my colleagues weren’t popping muscle relaxants before meetings, it would be Valium or Xanax. Many of the secretaries were getting high at lunch hour in the UN gardens, then spending afternoons downloading music from the web.

  We still held meetings, but I had to point out, at the end of them, that I had nothing of relevance to put down in my meeting notes. The pleading looks in my colleagues’ eyes read, Can’t you just pretend? But no, I could not.