Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  In total, Abdelnour was given vouchers for 7.3 million barrels of Iraqi oil, which he swiftly resold for an estimated total profit of $1.5 million—money he could never have made without Pasha’s intervention. Between 1999 and 2003, Pasha repeatedly solicited oil allocations from the Iraqis, even demanding increases for his friend Abdelnour. The Oil Ministry’s records left no doubt. In their eyes, the recipient of these allocations was Pasha. And AMEP, the Panama-registered company owned by Abdelnour, was merely a front.

  This was the same period in which Pasha isolated our Program Management Division, as we kept trying to blow the whistle on other types of Iraqi fraud. The same period during which he made a great push for the United States to allow more contracts through the system. The same period in which he undertook sudden trips abroad, to Geneva, Vienna, Lebanon, and Cyprus—even flying in for “consultations” with the Iraqi oil minister without note-takers. Pasha, who never used to take a single day of vacation, was now traveling the world and acting increasingly paranoid with his colleagues at the office upon his return.

  According to Volcker, Pasha might have received money through various intermediaries, possibly including his aunt, who lived in Cyprus. He was supposedly given $160,000 in cash from his aunt, a retired government employee in Cyprus, who lived a modest life and was not reported to have had access to such sums. Interviews with friends, neighbors, and employees at her bank suggested that this money could not have come from her own government-issued retirement checks, which barely allowed her to get by. She had no other known sources of revenue.

  Pasha reported these cash payments from his aunt as “reimbursement” for letting her stay with him at his New York apartment for a few months. Who makes his aunt pay for staying with him? Pasha’s relationship with his aunt was a close one, too. She had taken care of him like a mother when he was a child. According to a relative who spoke with a journalist from the Times of London, Pasha was an illegitimate son whose father had apparently refused to recognize him. His mother was shunned by his father’s family and was forced to leave little Pasha in the care of his aunt.

  In April 2004, just as the Volcker Committee started investigating the Oil-for-Food program, Pasha’s eighty-four-year-old aunt fell down an elevator shaft. She went into a coma. The same month, Pasha closed a bank account they had held jointly. She died in June in a hospital, having never emerged from her coma. Her tragic death prevented the investigators from interviewing her and prompted speculation about whether the old woman had in fact been pushed down that elevator shaft.

  It looked really, really bad. The suggestion, made by some observers, that Pasha’s aunt’s death might not have been so accidental, given her unique role as a witness in this affair, was never substantiated. But this didn’t stop journalists from speculating or even joking about the tragic event. One particularly acerbic journalist declared that the United Nations’ credibility was plummeting “as fast as” Pasha’s aunt “down the elevator shaft.”

  A rather distasteful image.

  While Pasha’s aunt’s untimely death prevented Volcker from proving that Pasha used her to funnel money from Abdelnour, investigators found other evidence to corroborate the bribery charge. In fact, the Volcker Committee proved that he had made use of a secret bank account in Switzerland held by Abdelnour (who also happened to be Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s cousin). Together with another influential Egyptian businessman named Fred Nadler (who happened to be Boutros-Ghali’s brother-in-law), they formed a trio that allegedly split the profits derived from Iraq’s underpriced oil allocations to Pasha.

  Boutros-Ghali was the UN’s chief back in 1996, when the Oil-for-Food program was adopted. An extensive examination of his bank accounts revealed no evidence that he had ever taken a bribe. Then again, the $10 million in cash that Saddam had given Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park to create “goodwill” at the UN for an Oil-for-Food program might never have entered the banking system.

  We would probably never know if Boutros-Ghali ever touched any of the money allocated to bribes by Saddam at the outset of the program. But Pasha’s fate was now sealed.

  Through his lawyer, Pasha denied having received “a cent” from Abdelnour’s oil transactions. But Pasha did not help his case by lying to Volcker about the nature of his relationship with the man.

  At first, Pasha denied having met with the Egyptian oil trader more than once. Their only meeting was supposed to have occurred in March 1999 at an OPEC conference in Vienna. When confronted with his own mobile phone records, which showed multiple calls between the two men, Pasha’s story changed, and he admitted they had a second “chance” meeting in Geneva (that would explain the second business card for Abdelnour, which investigators found in Pasha’s cigar box when they searched his office). The second business card had a different address for Abdelnour’s company, following a relocation of his business to Monaco. This suggested at least two separate meetings. Eventually, when pressed by investigators, Pasha admitted to having developed an “acquaintance” with the oil trader, and later admitted to a “friendship” that had lasted several years.

  “I came to like the guy,” said Pasha. “He is an interesting character, you know, he’s been around the world.” A minute before, he had never heard of the guy. His story was falling apart fast.

  Then came the question of what Pasha was doing at the March 1999 OPEC meeting, since he had no official business being there. According to Volcker, Pasha had gone there to ask the Iraqi oil minister for an increase in Abdelnour’s oil allocation. This was according to the Iraqi minister himself, who was now in U.S. custody. When pressed on this question by the Volcker team, Pasha contradicted himself again:

  Investigator: In the meeting in Vienna, did you ever have any discussions with the oil minister about lifts for this particular company [AMEP]?

  Pasha: No.

  Investigator: Or the amount of lifts that this particular company would get?

  Pasha: Well, like I said, the guy wants more oil.

  Investigator: You would have said that?

  Pasha: I might have said, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

  Unfortunately, the Iraqi oil minister remembered. It’s incredible how much people remember when they sit in jail. And records showed an increase in the allocation to AMEP after this crucial meeting.

  The facts were in. Pasha had solicited and gotten a total of five allocations, for millions of barrels of oil, for his friend. And each time, these allocations would be duly noted in the Iraqi Oil Ministry’s records and approved personally by Saddam. The Iraqi oil minister explained that they had given these allocations to Pasha because he was “a person of influence.” The oil minister even boasted about having Pasha in his pocket to his associates in the Iraqi government, whom the Volcker Committee also interviewed.

  Suddenly, the many pieces of my Kafkaesque UN experience started falling into place. For example, one day in 1999, we received a call from a Swedish company that wanted to export trucks to Iraq.

  “The Iraqis are demanding 10 percent in kickbacks on the contract,” the company’s representative said to Christer, my newly appointed Swedish director. “Is that . . . ehh . . . legal?”

  Christer stormed into my office to inquire.

  “No, of course it’s not legal,” I said.

  “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “We tell the Security Council!”

  “But we’re no longer allowed to communicate with the Security Council,” said Christer.

  “Damn Cindy!” I said.

  This was during my own paranoid phase, when I was blaming Cindy for manipulating Pasha into isolating our office.

  I had it all wrong. Pasha was always firmly in control. Cindy was only his tool, and he knew exactly how to use her. The reason he didn’t want our office communicating with the Security Council was that we were constantly raising issues of noncompliance by the Iraqi regime.

  After the Swedish manufacturer was informed that it would need to pay a 10 p
ercent kickback to the Iraqi regime, the company had, naturally, sought help from the UN. But after an absurd exchange of memos between my director and Pasha’s office, the company was told it had come to the wrong window.

  Pasha had squashed an attempt to denounce Saddam’s fraud. And yet none of us held Pasha directly responsible. The ongoing turf war in the office allowed him to cover his tracks and kept us busy blaming each other, every step of the way.

  “Don’t underestimate me!” Pasha used to say. He repeated that warning to the journalists who hounded him following the publication of his name on the list of Saddam’s bribe recipients. And indeed, how could one underestimate a man who had managed to fool everyone around him for years, even as he skimmed money off the fund he had been charged with safekeeping?

  Had it not been for the war, Pasha would never have been caught. He had not made a single obvious mistake. No money had been transferred directly to his account. He had withdrawn the money in cash from Switzerland, then fed it into his bank account in New York in smaller sums of less than $10,000, which triggered no alarm bells at the Treasury Department. And his political maneuvers in the UN Security Council had not even gotten the United States or Britain angry, or even suspicious of him. He had not taken any political stance in favor of lifting the sanctions, as others had. (Of course, this would have been bad for his little business.) He had flown under the radar and had everybody around him, including me, convinced of his innocence right up to the day of Volcker’s briefing, which found him guilty of fraud that presented “a grave conflict of interest and . . . seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations.”

  When Volcker was done with his account, he was assaulted with questions from the press. I had a million questions for him myself, but I just sat there, in the middle of the media frenzy, emotionally knocked out.

  As I looked around the room, the whole situation seemed unreal, almost fictional.

  “Would you say that Mr. Sevan took a bribe?” came the question from CNN’s Richard Roth (for whom I had worked right after college, before I joined the UN). It was much worse than that. Pasha had actually asked for a bribe. Many bribes. . . .

  Why, Pasha?

  I recalled an evening in the fall of 2000. An impending storm had kept me in the office late. It was one of those massive New York tempests that gather steam all day long and wait until people leave the office to wreak havoc on the city.

  As I waited for the tempest to break, I decided to visit with some colleagues in the office. Cindy had recently sent a memo around reminding all staff that it was “against UN rules” to accept any gifts from contractors doing business under the program. Since Cindy never sent out memos without a reason, I was trying to find out whom she might be suspecting. She had sent the memo right before going on extended leave, so I didn’t have the luxury of asking her directly. At the time, I assumed she was probably setting the stage for another one of her power grabs. But in retrospect, there was only one explanation: she knew what Pasha was up to. And this was her way of letting him know.

  Had her memo been a subtle way of blackmailing him? Or was she simply trying to do what she could with the means that she had? Memos were our only tools. We were in business with one of the most corrupt regimes on earth, and we were expected to enforce international law with memos.

  It didn’t help, of course, that the man who ultimately controlled the flow of these memos was on Saddam’s payroll. And I can only imagine how stressed Cindy would have felt if she had indeed come across clues that Pasha was dipping in the pot. Whom could she confide in? Her drive to consolidate her power in the office had been successful, but it had left her all alone in a position of enormous responsibility. Pasha had let her have her way. You want control? Take it. It’ll keep you busy while I run my little business on the side.

  Cindy eventually had a breakdown, which explained why she was away from the office that stormy night. Officially, the problem was with her lower back. She functioned on double doses of Valium, painkillers, and muscle relaxants, and had gained a lot of weight before finally throwing up her arms and going on sick leave. What I didn’t realize at the time was that she, too, was going through hell in this office. Everybody who worked for Pasha eventually went the same route. And rarely did they realize that he was the source of what ailed them. They would blame other colleagues but never Pasha. He played stupid all along, even as he was sowing division around his shop.

  In retrospect, I’d say nobody played stupid better than Pasha. He had elevated it to an art form. His outbursts of anger, irrational as they seemed, were never improvised. Even his incomprehensible elocution often worked in his favor. He could sound clear when he wanted to. But occasionally his blurry words allowed him to remain noncommittal when it suited him, to be evasive when necessary, and to bait his interlocutors. He would sometimes say just one word, without bothering to make a sentence, just to see one’s reaction. And that was what he did that night, when he surprised me in a colleague’s office as I was conducting my little investigation into the reasons for Cindy’s memo.

  “Happy now?” Pasha said, after slapping me on the neck by surprise.

  “Oh, hello, sir.”

  “Happy now, huh?”

  “Why should I be happy?”

  “Your friend Cindy is in the hospital!”

  “She is? Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Her back’s facked ap!”

  “Shit. . . .”

  “So your director is officer-in-charge!”

  “Why, you leaving?”

  “Yeah, I have to go to this . . .” (didn’t bother to finish the sentence). “But keep an eye on your boss, eh? I don’t want no shit while I’m gone. It’s not because Cindy’s in the hospital that he can do whatever he wants! These two, really, they’re like cats and dogs!” Pasha continued, as if he had no role in setting his underlings up for a permanent conflict. “You should see the shit I have on my desk. Back and forth, back and forth, they never stop with the facking memos.”

  I followed him to his office to see what he was on about, but when we arrived, Pasha’s mind had flipped the channel.

  “Scotch?” asked Pasha.

  The storm was now pounding the building. A thousand little red lights down on First Avenue told me traffic was hell. So I slipped into the leather chair facing Pasha’s desk and took a burning sip of scotch. It had been a long time since we had sat down one-on-one like this. Since isolating our side of the shop, he had kept interactions to a minimum. But the moment he had said “scotch” that night, I got the feeling he had something to tell me.

  “Look at all this shit,” said Pasha, pointing to a bunch of bills on his table. “I spend all my time on this facking program,” he complained. “Everybody’s making millions, and me, I don’t even have time to pay my bills!”

  I had heard him say this before. But that night, he seemed more stressed than usual. His daughter was applying to college—Boston University. Thirty thousand bucks a year. And the thirty-eighth floor was sitting on his contract renewal, raising the prospect that he might soon have to retire. Pasha, of course, had no desire to leave his throne.

  “I spent my whole life for this organization and this is how they thank me!” he said, relighting his cigar. The guy was worried about his financial future. He made a respectable $186,000 a year, tax-free, owned an apartment in New York and a house in the Hamptons, but his social status was linked to his job. In retirement, he wouldn’t have a diplomatic passport, nor would he be able to expense his travels.

  “If I had wanted to, I could have been a millionaire,” he said. “With all the people I know . . . trust me . . . it would not have been a problem!”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No, I do.”

  “You better believe it! Millions!”

  The man who could have been a millionaire looked around his office, contemplating the remains of his career—native artwork from the Pacific isl
ands, a picture of Pasha in his thirties with a naked cannibal from Papua New Guinea, a political cartoon by Plantu of Le Monde from his days in Afghanistan. He had served as the top UN envoy there during the fall of the Communist regime in Kabul. On the floor was a Shisha pipe from his days in Lebanon. Though his office was larger than the apartments of most of his employees, he didn’t have enough room on the wall for all his paintings. Gifts, for the most part.

  For an Armenian kid from Cyprus, whose father rejected him at birth, he had come very far in life. He had enjoyed a fascinating UN career and had reached the top of the pyramid with his appointment as under secretary general, now in charge of the largest operation in UN history.

  “Ah, yeah. . . .” said Pasha, nodding at the past.

  “You’ve had some great experiences,” I said.

  “Ha!” said Pasha, reminiscing.

  During his stint in Afghanistan, the Pakistani government had lent him a luxury jet plane with a mini-bar and all the amenities. Those were the days. UN officials used to get respect in this world. . . .

  “It used to be good money, too,” said Pasha. “Now? Forget it!”

  UN officials could still travel the world without putting their hand in their pocket, but the bubble of prosperity that had enveloped New York in the 1990s had sent prices skyward and left the world’s civil servants relatively poorer. They used to be able to afford large apartments in the city and lavish dinners at the hottest nightspots. The system was now populated by top managers who hated one another. Pasha could hardly mention the name of another high-level official without disgust. His enemies were numerous, and soon, they would band together to force him into retirement. Or so he feared.

  “I bet the secretary general will renew your contract,” I said.