Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  CHAPTER 28

  Boomerang

  “In this town, you’re considered innocent until investigated.”

  From the 2005 film Syriana

  CRUNCH GYM, EAST VILLAGE,

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2004

  I was pedaling on a bicycle specifically designed to go nowhere. To compensate for the extremely uneventful nature of this activity, I was, like the rest of my pedaling neighbors, looking up at a large TV screen to see what else was going on in the world.

  A week or so after my Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kofi Annan had given in to reason and ordered an independent investigation of the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal. Surprising even his most ardent critics, he had appointed Paul Volcker, a highly credible personality, to head a panel of inquiry. Volcker was the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and a veteran of high-level political investigations (Enron, the Nazi gold/Swiss banking scandal, among many others). He would lead a team of sixty international investigators, who would be given broad access to Iraqi and UN files.

  I felt somewhat vindicated by this turn of events, especially vis-à-vis those who had called me a traitor. After all, Annan had gone along with what I had advocated for. Others, including Congressmen and news editors, had made similar calls. But as the first UN insider to join the chorus, I may have helped tip the scale against continued stonewalling by the thirty-eighth floor. Also, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke had specifically warned the secretary general, in a secret meeting aimed at keeping Annan’s tenure afloat, that even people who were not traditional enemies of the UN were quickly becoming its harshest critics. Annan concluded that “a dark cloud” hung over the UN and decided that his only way out was to let the light shine in.

  My prediction had been that the onset of an investigation would keep the story out of the headlines for at least a few months, until Volcker’s findings were made public. I was wrong.

  Suddenly, as I was pedaling at the gym, Pasha’s face appeared on the TV screen above my head.

  I gasped. Pasha? What are you doing on the news? The Oil-for-Food program had shut down months ago. Pasha was getting ready to retire. Now he was being followed in the street by a Fox News camera crew. At one point, he stopped, faced the journalist, and took off his sunglasses. For a moment, it looked like he was going to head-butt the man with the microphone. What the hell was going on?

  News ticker: “. . . high-level UN official accused of taking bribes from Saddam . . .”

  What?

  After a few brief words with the Fox News reporter, which I couldn’t hear because I didn’t have freaking earphones to plug into the bloody bike, Pasha briskly walked away. The unsteady camera followed him.

  I started pedaling again, but only because the bike had Internet access. I Googled Pasha’s name and came across news reports citing Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a KPMG private investigator hired by the Iraqi authorities, saying he believed one of the names on Saddam’s secret list referred to the former under secretary general. Buried at the deep end of the list was a certain Mr. Sifan, which the Iraqis now alleged was a misspelled transliteration of Pasha’s last name: Sevan.

  Mr. Sifan was listed in association with a Panamanian trading company owned by a Lebanese individual. Millions of barrels of oil had been allocated to this murky Panamanian entity in the name of Mr. Sifan.

  Could Mr. Sifan really be Mr. Sevan?

  The names Sifan and Sevan had only three out of five letters in common. What if this Mr. Sifan was someone else? I Googled “Sifan” to check if that was an actual name, but little came up except articles alleging Mr. Sevan’s corruption. And the deeply uncomfortable fact of the matter was, “Mr. Sifan” was exactly how our Arabic counterparts used to address Mr. Sevan.

  Had my own boss been on Saddam’s payroll?

  No way. I knew the guy. He wouldn’t. . . .

  I called up Spooky. “Do you believe this shit?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I think some people are out to discredit the UN. I know things you don’t. Can’t talk now. . . .”

  Spooky had never been wrong before.

  I called up Christer: “What do you think?”

  “Nah. Pasha was a lot of things, but I don’t believe he was a crook. Kofi Annan can’t believe it either. Nobody’s buying this.”

  I dialed Pasha, but nobody picked up. I finally looked at my BlackBerry and feared it might short-circuit if it absorbed any more of my sweat. It showed five voicemails. Reporters and news producers, no doubt. A text message from a friend who worked in finance: “Dude, saw your boss on my Bloomberg screen. Think he did it?”

  Feeling a physical pinch of panic in my heart, I finally concluded that this stationary bike was not an ideal location for multimedia crisis management. Besides, I needed to think.

  As I showered, memories crept into my mind, fighting one another for my attention. I remembered Pasha quelling the agency rebellion on our first visit to Baghdad. Pasha had never been an open advocate of lifting the sanctions. He had flown under the radar, tried to make the program work. He had cried at the Baghdad hospital, in front of that little girl. Would he be able to do that and participate in a scheme to rip off Iraq’s civilians at the same time?

  It just didn’t make any sense.

  Pasha had made many enemies over the years. The Kurds, in particular, who now held prominent roles in the Iraqi government. The Shiites had grown resentful of the UN as well. The former Baathists had it in for us, too. I was pretty certain some of them had helped Al Qaeda engineer the bombing of our headquarters. If the list had indeed come from Saddam’s people, could it really be trusted? Or had the list been “adapted” to fit vengeful agendas?

  All scenarios were possible. A lot of money had flowed through the operation under Pasha’s control. Only the investigation that was now under way could deliver real answers. But it would take months before Volcker would reveal his findings. In the meantime, the media played judge, jury, and executioner. They would insert a small quote by Pasha at the end of a given article, saying he denied the charges against him, but by the time one got to that part, Pasha looked guilty as a raccoon atop a trash can. An increasing number of such reports surfaced every day.

  And yet nothing had been proven.

  Instead of facing reporters and answering their questions straight up, Pasha often tried to walk away, and then, when the reporters managed to corner him, he issued moody outbursts of gobbledygook, which were then spliced into semi-understandable sound bites by news editors and organized into a news sequence that made him look like a crook on the run.

  It was painful to watch. Pasha flew to the other end of the world to escape the spotlight, but when he arrived in Australia, he found reporters waiting for him in the lobby of his five-star hotel and casino resort. The media smelled blood. Pasha’s defensive statements, and the UN’s previous stonewalling, had only made the situation worse. When Pasha decided to return to New York, I felt somewhat relieved. He enjoyed diplomatic immunity, and Kofi Annan had made no threat to lift it. Annan confirmed his belief that Pasha was innocent. They had known each other for decades. And nobody I spoke to at the UN, including some of Pasha’s avowed enemies, believed in his guilt.

  I hoped they were right. For Pasha’s sake, for the UN’s sake, and for the sake of all of us who had worked for this operation, I hoped Pasha was innocent. If he wasn’t, chances were I might have been at his side when the man got himself into trouble. And the last thing I wanted to do was testify against Pasha in court.

  From now until the investigation was completed, everything I had ever said or done while working for Pasha could be subject to scrutiny. Every e-mail, every memo, every note would come under the microscope, as Pasha became the main target of Volcker’s $30 million probe.

  When I shared my concerns with my flatmate, he laughed, then observed, “So I guess this whole investigation thing might boomerang back in your face.”

  It was one way to put it.
/>   CHAPTER 29

  The Man Who Could Have Been a Millionaire

  HELMSLEY HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 8, 2005

  It was a chaotic media circus. Some thirty camera crews and more than a hundred journalists stepping over one another, arguing over seating arrangements and microphone spots, in a conference room at the Helmsley Hotel, on Forty-Second Street, a few blocks from the United Nations. Paul Volcker had chosen a site outside the UN for his press conference to emphasize his independence from the organization.

  Volcker was a giant in reputation and stature. When Kofi Annan called him, he took a quick glance at the Oil-for-Food fiasco and asked the secretary general what part of that mess he was supposed to investigate. Annan was eager to have the allegations against his own person cleared as a matter of priority, and he very much hoped the bribery accusation against Pasha was baseless. But the big question was how the UN had allowed Saddam Hussein to get away with a multibillion-dollar heist at a time when that money was meant to alleviate the “urgent humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.”

  Volcker quickly figured out the political implications of the probe. In his previous investigation of the Swiss banking scandal, he had shown no hesitation about accusing the Vatican itself of financial fraud. He was not afraid to dive into this challenge. But he understood that he would need a clear mandate, and legal authority, before proceeding.

  He told Annan he would do it, but only if he was appointed by an official Security Council resolution.

  The nerve. . . . It’s not anybody who can just walk into the UN and demand a Security Council resolution before getting to work.

  This put the UN Security Council in somewhat of a bind. All members understood that if a man of Volcker’s caliber stuck his nose into the secret proceedings of their sanctions committee, where all the wheeling and dealing had occurred, he’d find evidence that would make all of them look very bad.

  Russia, the country that did the most business with Saddam, denounced the effort publicly. “This is the first time that the American media is imposing such a thing on the UN,” said the Russian ambassador.

  Well, yes, it was. And now members of the Security Council had to contend with Volcker himself. The new sheriff in town had the diplomats backed into a corner. If they turned down his request for a resolution, it would be the PR equivalent of O.J. Simpson fleeing justice in his white Bronco.

  France calculated that it had better get behind this probe. French diplomats were in the process of doing damage control after Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin had sparked a wave of anti-French sentiment in the United States in the lead-up to the war. France knew that if it refused to back the investigation, it would be in for another public flogging in the U.S. media. France’s public enthusiasm for the probe was almost comical, in that it was a 180-degree reversal from its long-standing efforts to loosen UN oversight of the Oil-for-Food program. But it was also a critical, defining decision, as it left Russia cornered. Finally, in April 2004, Russia caved under pressure from the media. Resolution 1538 was adopted unanimously. However, as was tradition when it came to Iraq issues, it would not be complied with unanimously.

  After getting his way in the Security Council, Volcker gave its members an ominous warning. He said he wanted to make sure they understood what they were “getting into” here. He had ambassadors from the most powerful nations on earth looking down at their feet.

  Thirty million dollars and sixty investigators. Those were Volcker’s next demands. Where would the money come from? As usual, Iraqis were asked to foot the bill. Actually, they weren’t even asked; they were forced. There was money left over from the Oil-for-Food accounts. Without waiting for the Iraqis to consent, the Security Council allocated this money to the investigation. None of the countries on the Council would dip into their own pocket for funding.

  The Iraqis had paid the UN to oversee the Oil-for-Food program, and now they were going to pay the UN to investigate itself for having screwed it up. Some Iraqi politicians were outraged by this development. But they had no voice, no seat at the table.

  It took Volcker a long time to get his shop up and running. After experiencing firsthand the frustrations of dealing with the UN, he assembled a team of people from outside the organization and went to work.

  The day of the press conference, he was scheduled to brief the press on his initial findings. By then, I had made a transition to journalism. I attended the briefing as a freelancer.

  I should have arrived earlier. There was no place to sit. Among the early birds were familiar faces—members of the UN press corps and some journalists who had made it to New York from around the world especially for the occasion, from countries where indictments had started to fly. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard had come under investigation for the role the Australian Wheat Board—a governmental body—had played in sending kickbacks to Saddam. Germans were interested in the fate of companies like Siemens and Mercedes-Benz, which had clearly also gone along with the kickback scheme. Swedish carmaker Volvo had been cited as well, as had Danish water and sanitation companies, Jordanian pharmaceutical traders, South African construction firms . . . the scheme seemed to have reached every corner of the globe.

  I trusted Paul Volcker to get to the bottom of this affair. Others, however, did not.

  The independent panel Volcker headed was seen by many conservatives to be too soft on Annan. Lawmakers in Congress had set up their own investigations to bring extra pressure to bear on the secretary general. Several Republican lawmakers had already called for Annan’s resignation. In addition, investigations had been launched by the FBI, the CIA, the District Attorney’s offices in New York and Texas, as well as a string of international judges—a total of twelve were up and running, all competing to scoop one another as reporters were racing for the ultimate prize.

  Calls for Annan to step down were getting louder with every one of Volcker’s interim reports. But the UN secretary general was determined to hang on. When CNN’s Richard Roth asked him point-blank if the time had come for him to resign, Annan replied, “Hell no!”

  Of all the corruption charges that had been brought against the United Nations, the ones against Annan were the most speculative. He had neither taken a bribe from Saddam nor given him a kickback, which made him less guilty than more than 2,300 companies worldwide and hundreds of international power brokers.

  Yes, he had mismanaged—or, rather, refused to get personally involved in—the Oil-for-Food operation, despite the fact that it was the largest financial scheme the organization was asked to manage under his tenure.

  As the UN’s official CEO, he had presided over the most corrupt enterprise in the organization’s history without once moving a finger to set it right before it was too late. And the political forces that the secretary general had enraged by calling the invasion of Iraq “illegal” were not about to let him off the hook. The presidential campaign was in full swing, and the Bush administration was subject to intense public scrutiny. The absence of significant stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib debacle, the Scooter Libby investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame—all were dogging the White House. The scandal at the UN provided a welcome reprieve.

  The problem with the Oil-for-Food affair, from Annan’s point of view, was that as revelations gradually trickled out over time, they would not necessarily grab the front page. But they would appear frequently enough to stay in the public eye and require mainstream news editors to assign reporters to the “UN scandal beat” for extended periods of time. Once journalists started digging into the gutter of the UN’s relationship with Iraq, they came across a wealth of material, including an old story involving a possible conflict of interest by Annan himself. In 1998 the London Telegraph had reported that the UN had wrongly awarded a contract to Cotecna, the company that employed Kofi Annan’s twenty-four-year-old son Kojo. The company was in charge of certifying the arrival of humanitarian supplies at the Iraqi border. The story had bee
n leaked to the Telegraph by Lloyd’s Register of London, which lost the bidding war to Cotecna.

  Had Kofi Annan intervened in favor of the company that employed his son? It was a legitimate question to ask. Kojo had indeed been roaming around the UN’s procurement department (where secret bids are accepted on all UN contracts), and there were rumors describing him as something of a “player” who liked to use his father’s name to get ahead. But that in itself is not a crime, and ultimately, no solid proof emerged that Kofi Annan had tried to influence the procurement process in favor of his son. Perhaps some people, including Pasha, helped Cotecna along to gain favor with the secretary general, but that would assume they knew Kojo was employed at Cotecna, which was not a proven fact.

  Nonetheless, some of the Volcker Committee investigators believed Annan had lied to them during one of his interviews. Confidential documents from the Volcker Committee were leaked to Congress, then to Fox News. They included a transcript of a conversation between Volcker and Robert Parton, one of his investigators. When the discussion turned to how truthful Kofi Annan had been under questioning, Volcker said, “Well, my general feeling about the report is that if you accuse him of lying, he is gone”—meaning Annan would be forced to resign. “I don’t know if we have the evidence to make that accusation. But we have a lot of unexplained business. The facts will speak for themselves. We can’t conclude he lied. But other people may conclude that.”

  Volcker had spoken. But Parton, the investigator who had questioned Annan, saw the situation from a reverse angle: “You start adding up a collection of individual points—maybe none of them is sufficient alone, but when you add them together I don’t believe him on our standard of proof.”

  “What is our standard of proof?” asked Volcker, to which Parton replied, “More likely than not.”