Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  In my own view, such talk of “neutrality” ultimately made no sense in the context of this war. The UN’s own Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, made it an automatic enemy of groups like Al Qaeda. Even if the UN remained unable to adopt an official definition of terrorism, it could no longer ignore that it was a target of it and would remain so as long as it purported to defend values of human dignity and tolerance that are anachronistic to the aims of violent fundamentalist groups.

  Terrorism against the UN and other humanitarian agencies would continue. In Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Lebanon, and Sudan, UN staff would remain prime targets for months and years to come. Unfortunately, the United Nations would remain unable to adopt an official definition for terrorism.

  Thankfully, there are dictionaries. Here’s one definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica: “the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and bring about a particular political objective.”

  Why couldn’t the United Nations adopt this simple definition? The states that voted against adoption did so mostly because they did not wish to condemn Palestinian terror actions against Israel. More generally, they would argue that terrorism could be justified in circumstances of occupation.

  Obviously, attacks against an occupying army cannot be lumped together with attacks against civilians and noncombatants. But this distinction can be accommodated easily in a definition. One UN panel, led by Alex P. Schmid, a Dutch scholar, proposed the following formulation: “any act intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or noncombatants, with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization.”

  Unfortunately, the United Nations could not adopt that definition either. The argument against adoption was ultimately summed up with the following slogan: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

  That slogan never made any sense to me. In my reading, the people who attacked us in Iraq were not freedom fighters. Nor, in fact, did they claim to be.

  Zarqawi, who stood behind this and many other attacks, made it very clear in a letter to Osama bin Laden, in February 2004, that he feared the progress of democracy in Iraq. Specifically, he worried that it might take some steam out of his efforts to foment a civil war. “A gap will emerge between us and the people of the land,” he wrote. “How can we fight their cousins and their sons, and under what pretext, after the Americans, who hold the reins of power from their rear bases, pull back?”

  “Democracy is coming,” he added, “and there will be no excuse thereafter.” Hence his advice to bin Laden to try everything to foment a civil war, which would sabotage the establishment of democracy: “The only solution is for us to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shi’a with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis. Someone may say that, in this matter, we are being hasty and rash and leading the Islamic nation into a battle for which it is not ready, a battle that will be revolting and in which blood will be spilled. [But] this is exactly what we want, since right and wrong no longer have any place in our current situation.”

  Were these the words of a freedom fighter? Not by any stretch of the imagination. What Zarqawi’s words illustrate is how easy it can be to justify blind violence against civilians once one no longer feels a duty to distinguish between right and wrong on a basic human level.

  As I witnessed Iraq descend into an inferno of violence in the months following the destruction of our compound, I noticed how some diplomats and journalists were careful to avoid using the word “terrorist” when describing attacks that clearly qualified as such. Terrorists were often referred to as “militants” or “insurgents,” even when the targets were clearly civilian and the intent was clearly to spread terror.

  I wondered how the bombings of weddings, of mosques, of markets, and even of funerals could be described as acts of insurgency. What were those “militants” rebelling against? The institution of marriage? The right to sell and buy food? The right to pray? The right to bury one’s kin with dignity?

  Whether the victims of such acts were in New York, Baghdad, London, Amman, Sharm el-Sheikh, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Algiers, Casablanca, Tunis, Madrid, Paris, Bali, Amsterdam, or Mecca, they had one thing in common. They were victims of a crime against humanity called terrorism. The ones who commandeered and perpetrated such crimes did not achieve freedom for anybody. They merely sullied whatever causes they claimed to be acting for.

  There are only so many ways of responding to acts of terror. One way is to hold the perpetrators responsible and seek to eliminate the threat they pose. Another way is to cower. The UN did claim, officially at least, that it would never bow to terror, that it was active in the “fight against terrorism.” But what did this mean, concretely, if the organization could not even adopt an official definition for the phenomenon it was supposed to fight against?

  In the months following the tragic bombing that forced the United Nations and most of the humanitarian community to flee from Iraq, Zarqawi’s terror network used brutality against Iraqi civilians to take control of several cities. One of them was Fallujah, in Anbar province, which would become the scene of one of the most bloody battles between Al Qaeda and Iraqi and U.S. forces.

  During the counterattack against terrorists holed up in Fallujah, in March 2004, Kofi Annan wrote a letter to Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, in which he asserted that the “use of force” against insurgents only risked “deepening” the Iraqi people’s “sense of alienation.” To which the Iraqi minister replied, “I was surprised by the lack of mention in your letter of any of the atrocities” committed by the terrorists.

  I attended a memorial concert for Fiona Watson, at the Cavalry Church in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, a few weeks after the bombing. Spooky had decided to play the harpsichord. All my former colleagues were there to honor Fiona’s life and sacrifice. It was difficult to understand how such a positive and lively woman could be taken from us.

  As Spooky performed the encore—an aria from Handel’s Great Oratorio—I let my gaze rest on a candle.

  Descend, kind pity, heav’nly guest,

  Descend, and fill each human breast

  With sympathizing woe.

  That liberty, and peace of mind,

  May sweetly harmonize mankind,

  And bless the world below.

  To which I added a personal prayer: may the perpetrators of this attack be found and taken out.

  Insofar as the United Nations reacted to this bombing by seeking to rekindle its “position of neutrality in the world,” it was clear to me that I could not afford to rejoin the UN in Iraq. Neutrality was simply not a cause I was willing to die for.

  CHAPTER 27

  Saddam’s Secret List

  “When I get a hold of the son of a bitch who leaked this, I’m gonna tear his eyeballs out, and I’m gonna suck his fucking skull!”

  GORDON GEKKO, Wall Street

  On January 25, 2004, beepers and cellphones began ringing at intelligence headquarters and chanceries around the world. The reason was an article published by Al-Mada, an independent newspaper in Baghdad, which contained a secret list of names compiled by Saddam’s personal accountants.

  “Presidents, Journalists, and Political Parties

  Received Millions of Oil Barrels From Saddam”

  [translated from Arabic]

  BAGHDAD—Al-Mada has obtained a list of the individuals and firms to whom Saddam Hussein allocated crude oil during the various stages of the UN “oil-for-food” program. The list includes the names of individuals, companies, political parties, groups, and organizations from all over the world.

  Interestingly most of the recipients of Iraqi oil had nothing to do with the oil business. They were neither involved in oil distribution nor in its storage or its sale and were not known to be interested in oil before they received these allocations. They include, among others, the Russian Orthodox Church . . .
the Russian Communist Party . . . French politicians . . . the president of Indonesia . . . a British member of Parliament . . . Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian politicians . . . and the list goes on. Two hundred and seventy people in all.

  [The list shows that] the defunct regime of Saddam Hussein had turned the UN program into a dirty business and a political game to fund his secret purchases of armament, expensive construction materials for the presidential palaces, and luxury items for extravagance. It also turned the contract for selling oil into the biggest operation in modern history for buying loyalty and influence around the world. . . .

  Foreign journalists jammed inside the U.S.-occupied “Green Zone” of Baghdad scrambled for copies of the article. Al-Mada, owned by Fakhri Kareem, a Kurdish opponent to Saddam Hussein, made a name for itself that day. It was not a scoop; it was a bomb. The list of 270 bribe-takers was picked up by the newswires, and within hours bloggers in the United States had pounced on the story, running independent searches to confirm the identities of the people it named.

  The list had been found in the archives of the Iraqi Oil Ministry and, according to the article, had been leaked by former Baathists to members of Iraq’s Governing Council. In September 2003 I had been warned, by an old college friend whose father now sat on the Iraqi Governing Council, that extremely sensitive documents had been retrieved from Saddam’s files, one of which implicated the UN Oil-for-Food program in massive international fraud.

  I had immediately called the United Nations to warn them and advise them to launch an internal investigation into fraud under the program. I spoke to Christer, my second Swedish director, who told me he knew for certain that Pasha would not permit such an investigation. So I called Spooky. The latter told me to meet him for lunch. He set a rendezvous point at “the clock, by the information desk, in the middle of Grand Central Station.”

  “Why not meet directly at a restaurant?” I asked.

  Then I remembered. It is a standard security precaution, when one wants to make sure a conversation stays private, to set a meeting point that is not the ultimate place where the talking takes place. We would meet by the clock at Grand Central and pick a restaurant at random from there.

  Trevor asked me for the source of my information. My friend from Brown University was called Tamara Chalabi. Her father, Ahmad Chalabi, had been the Pentagon’s candidate of choice to lead the “new Iraq.” The CIA and the State Department opposed the man and gave preference to Iyad Allawi. Chalabi had been accused in the media of defrauding the Petra Bank in Jordan in the 1980s. He personally argued that he was forced to flee Jordan because Saddam had sent assassins to kill him. I had no idea which version was true, but I knew Tamara well. She had worked for The Brown Journal of World Affairs , which I had cofounded and edited, and she had gone on to get a PhD in history at Harvard. She had followed her father to Baghdad during the war and visited the old home from which her family had been ejected before she was born. The Chalabis are an old, well-known Iraqi family whose prominence dates back further than the creation of the modern Iraqi state itself, in 1924. Her forefathers had participated in the creation of Iraq at the time when Gertrude Bell, Lawrence of Arabia, and Winston Churchill were involved in transforming that piece of the Ottoman Empire into a kingdom that would ultimately achieve independence from British rule. Her father was now working with Paul Bremer, the CIA veteran President Bush had appointed as proconsul in Iraq. The finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council, which included Chalabi and other Iraqi leaders, had discovered Saddam’s secret list months before it was leaked to Al-Mada.

  Back when I met with Spooky, I had no idea what shape or form the document would take, or what it included, but if Tamara said it was incriminating for the United Nations, I trusted she had it from a good source. She had heard that I was considering rejoining the United Nations and was telling me to be careful because a scandal might break out. She was not at liberty to give me further details, and I would not reveal her as my source to Spooky. But I repeated my advice that the UN should investigate itself before it was too late.

  Spooky smiled, the way he always did when he thought I was being naïve. “They’re going to shove it all under the carpet,” he said, as he ordered another glass of wine. Then he shared the story of another UN colleague named Rehan Mullick, a bright Pakistani-American database manager, who had joined the UN right after I left. Rehan had sought to alert New York to the Iraqi government’s massive diversion of goods bought under the Oil-for-Food program. His report was ignored. No action was taken—except for the fact that Rehan’s contract was not renewed.

  I asked why the man had not sought protection as a whistleblower. Spooky reminded me there was no such law protecting UN employees.

  “They simply got rid of him. Just like they got rid of you.”

  “I resigned,” I reminded him.

  “Well, one way or the other,” Spooky said. “They sidelined our office. Now my own contract is up for renewal. They’re delaying it. I don’t know if I’ll have a job next month.”

  We parted rather depressed. Spooky seemed resigned. All he wanted was a chance to put his skills and knowledge to good use in Iraq, but in the aftermath of the bombing, the UN had evacuated all personnel and everything was on hold (pending the revamping of the UN’s security office, a process that would take several years). In any case, Spooky was in no position to push for an investigation either.

  Several months passed, and still no scandal erupted. Pasha had been thanked profusely by all members of the United Nations Security Council as the Oil-for-Food operation officially closed down in November 2003. Was it possible that the Iraqis had been persuaded not to make public the documents they had found? By mid-January, I was beginning to think that history would simply roll forward and that the story of how the international community defrauded the Iraqi people for years, in collaboration with Saddam Hussein, would never fully come to light. Hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with UN files would simply be hoarded off to a huge depot, never to be opened again.

  Then Al-Mada dropped the bombshell. A wave of panic spread through the thousands of companies that had traded under the program, and a great number of international oil traders and other power brokers were awakened by calls from reporters trying to establish whether Saddam’s secret list of bribe-takers was genuine. Soon, they would receive visits from law enforcement officers as well.

  Upon reading the news, I picked up my phone.

  “Did you see it?” I asked Spooky.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it. The endgame has begun,” I ventured.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “God only knows where this will end.”

  It took time to decipher Saddam’s secret list. But right off the bat there were some interesting surprises. Few delegations on the UN Security Council would be spared embarrassment. Spooky had predicted a bloodbath in which only the most agile political backstabbers would survive. Another veteran of political investigations in Washington had made it even plainer to me: “Sharpen your knife, young man. There’s only two ways these things can go. Either the blame is put on people at the bottom of the pyramid or it’s laid on people at the top. Where do you think it belongs?”

  I’d have to think about that one. In the meantime, I tried to focus on understanding who did what and when, how it all related to my own experience and decisions, and how it might reflect on my former office.

  The case that most shocked the Iraqi newspaper’s editors was that of British Parliamentarian George Galloway. “The case of George Galloway is truly tragic,” the paper wrote. “This man defended many just Arab causes. But as soon as he got closer to the Iraqi regime, he was corrupted. . . .”

  Galloway was never charged with corruption. His Mariam Appeal charity was criticized by the British charity commission for not screening its funders and for losing its records. But the Iraqis were hardly surprised to find out the UN operation in general had been corrupted. They knew they weren’t
getting their money’s worth. Seeing the newspaper name people who appeared to have lobbied on their behalf in the past was just another piece of bad news, in another bad news week, crowning a bad news decade.

  The new Iraqi government was the first to launch an investigation, hiring the consulting firm KPMG to track down the sales records of people and firms listed as Saddam’s secret bribe-takers. The U.S. Congress, then dominated by Republicans, raised the stakes even further, launching five separate investigations. Committee chairmen in the House and Senate were falling over one another to shed light on the brewing scandal. Soon France, Britain, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and just about every accountable state on the planet (note the absence of Russia) would launch probes of their own.

  Bloggers went into overdrive, digging up all sorts of connections between people on the list and posting them on the web for journalists to feed on. Soon stories began to surface linking companies named on UN and U.S. terror watch lists for funding Al Qaeda as having benefited from Oil-for-Food contracts. Unnamed U.S. government officials would be quoted as saying, “It seems very plausible that [Iraq’s] oil money went to terrorism financing.”

  To some conservatives, it suddenly looked like the long-sought “smoking gun” linking Saddam to international terrorism might finally have surfaced. Saddam’s secret list allowed intelligence analysts to establish a connection between the Iraqi dictator and specific companies, such as Delta Oil, a Saudi oil company that supported the Taliban during the time Osama bin Laden was active in Afghanistan. But Pakistan, a nominal U.S. ally, had provided similar support to the Taliban. Not to speak of Congress itself, which, while it did not support the Taliban per se, was, thanks to the spectacular yet covert efforts of Congressman Charlie Wilson, the primary underwriter of weapons flowing into Afghanistan up to 1989.