Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  Volcker argued that this was not a standard to which the committee agreed. “I am not prepared to hang Kofi Annan on that,” he said. Volcker said he required “reasonably sufficient evidence.”

  Following the release of the first report, Kofi Annan made an appearance in the UN press room to announce he had been vindicated. Now that was certainly not true either. But the fact was, the accusation that might have toppled him was not related to the heart of the Oil-for-Food bribery scandal. Annan had not taken a bribe, nor had he put undue pressure on colleagues to approve a contract for the firm that employed his son.

  Did Annan receive special treatment from Volcker? Parton believed so. In his testimony behind closed doors to the House panel, Parton argued that “reasonably sufficient evidence” was not a legally accepted term because it was too subjective and that Volcker’s committee had previously agreed to judge each of the other individuals under investigation on the commonly used “more likely than not” standard of proof. After he failed to get his way, Parton resigned from the investigation in protest. (At least someone had the guts to resign in this whole affair.) But ultimately, whether one agrees with Volcker or Parton on the credibility of Kofi Annan’s testimony, both men had to agree they lacked solid proof to reach a definitive conclusion about Annan’s guilt. Conflict of interest there was. But a case for legal prosecution there was not.

  Still, the image of Kofi Annan had been thoroughly ruined. The average man in the street thought there was something fishy going on. The New York Post published a cartoon of a Kofi Annan statue (looking ominously like a Saddam Hussein statue) being toppled, about to fall into barrels of oil. The vagaries of his son Kojo provided plenty of mud for the media to sling at Kofi. They portrayed Kojo as a flashy playboy who had tried to get into all sorts of shady business deals. And there was no question that Kojo had lied to investigators about the length of his employment with Cotecna or that he had used his father’s name to get a good deal on a Mercedes-Benz sedan, which he imported to Ghana without paying tax duties.

  My answer to journalists who focused on such questions was, “Who cares? This is about what the international community did to the Iraqi people, not about what Kojo did using his father’s name!”

  It was quite obvious that the secretary general was learning about Kojo’s screw-ups at the same time as the public did. This, of course, was all the more fun for the press. UN officials were telling journalists, “Don’t blame the father for the sins of the son,” only to see the media exploit the potential for a family feud reality show.

  Short of resigning, all Annan could do to salvage what was left of his image was submit to what Volcker called “a good scrubbing” in full view of the public.

  The name of the game had changed. The challenge for the secretary general was no longer merely to keep the UN’s member states happy. The challenge was to fight a media war for which the UN was thoroughly unprepared. Until the scandal broke, Annan had applied every one of the cardinal rules that normally kept bureaucrats out of trouble. He had not made it to the top of the UN bureaucracy by taking risks. Annan put a perfect potential scapegoat in charge of the Oil-for-Food program (Pasha) and built an extra layer of protection by delegating all oversight responsibility to his deputy, Louise Fréchette.

  As Donald Rumsfeld, the perennial political survivor, once put it, “Move decisions out to the cabinet and agencies. Strengthen them by moving responsibility, authority, and accountability in their direction.” Yet even he submitted his resignation twice to President Bush after the Abu Ghraib fiasco.

  Of course, in the case of Kofi Annan, who was he to submit his resignation to? The Security Council, members of which had made millions in illegal revenues in defiance of their own resolutions? Certainly, none of the Security Council’s veto-yielding members were in a position to throw Annan the “first stone.” Annan asked for a vote of confidence in the Security Council for his continued stewardship. The United States abstained. Russia, China, Britain, and France backed him up.

  With Annan barely out of the woods, the investigation had turned to the allegations against other UN officials, the most important of which concerned Pasha. Had the head of the UN operation been on Saddam’s payroll?

  In my various testimonies—to Congress, the New York District Attorney’s office, the Volcker Committee, and even in some articles I wrote for The New Republic and Salon—I had been protective of Pasha, occasionally insisting that the charges against him were “highly unlikely” and most often concentrating my fire on the UN’s larger systemic flaws. I had gone back and researched the original vision that gave birth to the UN and previous institutions like the League of Nations, and even the Concert of Europe (which followed the Napoleonic wars). I ultimately ended up studying Immanuel Kant’s “Philosophical Sketch” on “Perpetual Peace.” Back in 1795, this Prussian philosopher had outlined a vision for an international institution that might be trusted to perpetuate peace among its members. In Kant’s vision, all members of such an institution would need to be democratic republics in order for it to work reliably as a conduit for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The United Nations aspired to universalism and aimed to include every state in the world as a member, irrespective of whether a given state could be trusted to play by the rules outlined in its Charter and Declaration of Human Rights. As a result of this widespread lack of accountability in the system, few states, including the democracies, were inclined to respect the institution’s rules when these were not convenient to their interests. In this conclusion I found a core explanation for what had happened.

  Now, in a historical first, the UN’s highest officials had become subject to real public scrutiny and accountability. Would Pasha survive this process?

  While we waited for Volcker to step up to the microphone, the tension in the packed room rose sharply, as a strange mix of reporters from diverse backgrounds angled for position. A fight broke out between a Korean camera crew and a French sound guy as we were waiting for Volcker to appear.

  “Merde alors, quel bordel!” said the Frenchman, replying to what must have been an insult in Korean. And it was, indeed, a bit of a bordel. Well-groomed, UN-accredited, diplomatic correspondents were pitted against loud and pushy paparazzi types. Reporters who might find it bold to ask an ambassador to “please elaborate on the substance” of his discussions were wrestling for position with hacks from the “Hey Jacko! Lose the umbrella!” school of journalism.

  Enter the giant.

  The room fell silent, except for the camera flashes, as Paul Volcker strode toward the podium. He seemed relaxed, almost aloof to the excitement that permeated the room. He had just wrapped up an investigation of the Enron scandal. That firm had tanked after it suddenly revealed losses of some $600 million. In this case Volcker was not even sure how many billions of dollars had gone missing, but he had discovered enough fraud by Saddam that we could safely add another zero to the Enron figure.

  Volcker’s towering presence (six feet eight inches!) made us look like a bunch of Lilliputians. He’d seen audiences like this before. He smiled calmly at us as he adjusted his glasses before lowering his tortoiselike head to read his statement.

  “Some principal findings based on evidence presented in the report are . . .”

  I sat on the edge of my seat, as Volcker cleared his throat.

  “One: that Mr. Sevan corruptly derived personal pecuniary benefit from the program through cash receipts from the sale of oil allocated by Iraq to Mr. Sevan and bought by African Middle East Petroleum Company Limited. Two: the participants had knowledge that some of the oil was purchased by paying an illegal surcharge to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions. . . .”

  As Volcker laid out his case, connecting events I had experienced firsthand with events I could not have imagined, vivid memories flashed to life inside my head.

  Volcker spoke too slowly to respond to all the questions that tumbled around in my mind. Copies of the report had been distributed at the p
ress conference, and as I was racing through it, one sentence caught my eye: “During one of his meetings with Oil Minister Rashid, the Executive Director of the Oil-for-Food program asked him for an allocation of oil.”

  Wait a minute. . . . I was there during Pasha’s meetings with the oil minister . . . and something relevant to the investigation had indeed taken place during one of those meetings, something I had failed to mention to Congress or even to the investigators, for fear that I might have to testify against Pasha in court. The report said Pasha asked for an oil gift from the Iraqis in “one of his meetings.” Well, that’s not exactly how it happened.

  Cut to Baghdad, summer of 1998. It was our second visit to Iraq. Pasha had been invited to lunch by the Iraqi minister of oil, Amir Mohammed Rashid, at the Baghdad Hunting Club—a members-only club used by Saddam Hussein to throw parties for the Baathist elite. In later years, it had been one of Uday Hussein’s hangouts; I had read various anecdotes that testified to the kind of festive mood that kid could get into. On one occasion, Uday had apparently barged into a wedding and kidnapped and raped the bride. The groom was left to close down the party by putting a bullet through his own head. A charming little anecdote to give one an appetite for lunch.

  The red-carpeted stairway led into a plush dining room, where Rashid treated Pasha, Bo, and me (plus three Iraqi oil technocrats) to a four-course meal. I was surprised by this development, because the last time we had met him, near the northern city of Kirkuk, he had gotten so angry that he all but spat in Pasha’s face. My notes from that meeting stopped suddenly, with these last scribbled words: “Wow—minister royally pissed off!!! Telling us to go back to New York!”

  What had prompted Rashid’s outburst had been a suggestion, by Pasha, about how the UN should monitor the oil-industry spare parts that the UN Security Council had recently approved for Iraq.

  After the UN raised the ceiling on how much oil Iraq was allowed to export, earlier that year, the Iraqi government had asked for the permission to import more spare parts to maintain its oil industry. The problem was that Iraq had started construction on an oil pipeline to Syria, which everybody knew would be used to export oil illegally for the sole profit of Saddam Hussein. So before the Security Council could agree to the request for oil-industry spare parts, we needed to set up a new “monitoring” system, to make sure the equipment wouldn’t be used to bust the sanctions. This required fielding monitors on location to Iraq’s oilfields. But the oil minister would allow us to position monitors only in Baghdad, where there were no oil facilities. From there, our inspectors would not be in a position to monitor much except their own fingernails. So Pasha had to insist, causing the minister to lash out in anger and call us spies.

  Then something strange happened. Pasha had said something about “a friend” who was interested in buying Iraqi oil. He first mentioned his “friend” in a conversation with the Iraqi foreign minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, during a visit to the Foreign Ministry. This question by Pasha had somehow provoked a dramatic change in atmosphere in our relations with the Iraqi government.

  “How does it work,” Pasha had asked the foreign minister, right in front of me, “if someone wants to buy Iraqi oil?” It was a good question, though perhaps a strange one coming from the head of the UN Oil-for-Food program. Shouldn’t Pasha know this?

  The minister’s eyes creased. “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, I have this friend who wants to buy Iraqi oil, and he was asking me how to do it, you know. . . .”

  “Aha. . . .” Sahaf nodded, adding, after a brief pause, that he would get back to us on the matter.

  It was soon thereafter that we received this invitation to lunch from the Iraqi oil minister—a dramatic change in approach by the Iraqis, who had, until then, treated Pasha with glaring contempt. I felt rather uncomfortable at the prospect of sitting down for lunch at the Baghdad Hunting Club. Having coffee with these criminals was part of our job. Having lunch was not.

  As we got out of the car, Pasha told me to leave my bag inside. He would not need me to take notes. We were served fancy salads and fish from the Tigris River by a staff of older men dressed in traditional black-and-white bistro attire. Pasha strayed away from official business, commenting on how good the food was. Rashid boasted that all ingredients were local, at which point my stomach said, Oh, really?

  Or some such sound. Pasha and Rashid got along brilliantly, as far as I could tell, between my various excursions to the men’s room. Every time I returned, Pasha would grimace at me discreetly, as if berating me for offending our host. Then he would encourage me to eat more, even though it had to be clear to anyone present that I had lost complete control over my digestive process.

  Years later, when investigators would grill me about the substance of the discussions that took place at that lunch, I would be hard-pressed to come up with anything useful to them. But now that Volcker was putting the pieces together, I suddenly realized what all these investigators were fishing for—an indication that a deal had been struck between Pasha and Iraq’s oil minister.

  In fact, the oral transaction the investigators were looking to corroborate happened right after lunch. We were walking down the red-carpeted staircase with the Iraqi oil minister when Pasha again mentioned his “friend.” He said his “friend” had tried to buy Iraqi oil and had sent a faxed inquiry to the Iraqi government but had not heard back from the ministry.

  Rashid turned his head to look at Pasha, then at me, and then said nothing until we stepped out of the building. “What is your . . . friend’s name?” asked the minister, once outside.

  Pasha said something incomprehensible. The man’s name was Fakhry Abdelnour, but with Pasha’s elocution, such a name stood no chance at being communicated.

  “Tell your friend to contact us again,” said the oil minister. It was the first time I had seen the man smile.

  And that was it, the beginning of another beautiful relationship. Before everyone started hugging, I went back to the car, where I had left my bag containing my Imodium pills. After swallowing a few I looked back at the crowd of jovial dignitaries shaking hands like old friends. Bo, my director, left the lunch party and walked back to the car briskly and sat beside me in silence for a few beats.

  “Who’s this friend he keeps talking about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Fackrablanour, or something.”

  “This is not the proper way to conduct official business,” said Bo before the driver got back into the car.

  That much seemed obvious. But since neither of us was yet aware of the specific practices that surrounded the oil trade, we couldn’t imagine that Pasha might stand to profit from this introduction. Besides, even after I found out more about the corruption involved in that trade, I figured Pasha wouldn’t do something so blatant as to put his foot in it right in front of me!

  As it happens, the Iraqi oil minister did not catch the name of Pasha’s “friend” any more than we did. So he instructed Iraq’s deputy ambassador in New York, Muwafaq Ayoub, to check with Pasha. Pasha had nicknamed Muwafaq “Bumblebee” because he was always buzzing around our office, uninvited, in search of information. He would ask for advance copies of reports, and he rather disliked me because I regularly declined his requests. Bumblebee would then buzz on, to see if someone else in the office would slip him a copy or if he could simply pick up documents that were lying around.

  “Keep an eye on Bumblebee,” Spooky had told me. “He’s spying on us right under our nose.” Increasingly, Pasha would agree to meet with Bumblebee alone. The proper counterpart for Pasha would have been the Iraqi ambassador himself, and protocol would have demanded the presence of a note-taker. But on more and more occasions, Bumblebee would show up unannounced, and Pasha would let him into his office, telling me, “No, it’s OK,” as I instinctively rushed over with a notepad in my hand. I was a bit surprised by this development, but again, I could not conceive of Pasha engaging in corruption so openly.

&nb
sp; What happened next would take place in great secrecy but would be detailed in carefully preserved Iraqi Oil Ministry files and eventually would be reconstructed by Volcker.

  In a letter dated August 10, 1998, the oil minister was informed by his marketing manager that a company called Africa Middle East Petroleum (AMEP) had asked to buy Iraqi oil. The company was owned by Fakhry Abdelnour, Pasha’s “friend.” Here’s how this information was communicated to Iraq’s oil minister by one of his aides:

  Dear Minister [ . . . ]

  Mr. Muwafaq Ayoub of the Iraqi mission in New York informed us by telephone that the abovementioned company [AMEP] is the company that Mr. Sevan, director of the Iraq Program at the United Nations, mentioned to you during his last trip to Baghdad.

  For your consideration and proportioning.

  In his own handwriting, the Iraqi oil minister then added that, following consultation with Saddam Hussein, “the permission of the Vice President of the Republic was received in a meeting of the Command Council on the morning of 15.8.1998. for the sale of 1.8 million barrels of oil” in the name of Mr. Sevan.

  It was a done deal.

  Pasha had probably hoped that all communications between himself and the Iraqi minister had stayed oral, en passant, and free of note-taking. But his poor elocution forced at least two additional communications, one by telephone and one by letter, to be inscribed into the meticulous records of the Oil Ministry before his friend could be helped.

  In a telex dated August 18, 1998 (eight days after the Iraqis confirmed that Abdelnour was indeed Pasha’s “friend”), Abdelnour was invited to visit Baghdad “to discuss matters related to the crude oil supply.”

  Abdelnour received Pasha’s allocation for 1.8 million barrels of crude oil. He immediately resold that voucher to Shell and pocketed a net profit of $300,000. Shell would take care of sending a ship to pick up the barrels. Abdelnour had made a quick (though illegal) killing. And it would be the first of many deals to come, as Pasha would repeatedly solicit the Iraqis for oil allocations on his behalf.