Backstabbing for Beginners: Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1 - Whistleblower

  U.N. BIG WILL TELL ALL ON OILY SCAM

  Part One

  CHAPTER 2 - Do-Gooder

  CHAPTER 3 - Welcome to the Game

  CHAPTER 4 - Fasten Your Seat Belts

  CHAPTER 5 - Cowboys and Bunny Huggers

  CHAPTER 6 - Coffee With Criminals

  CHAPTER 7 - The Great Misunderstanding

  CHAPTER 8 - From Russia With Love

  CHAPTER 9 - Never Say Kurdistan!

  CHAPTER 10 - The Rebels

  CHAPTER 11 - On the Edge

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 12 - The Baghdad Diet

  CHAPTER 13 - A Can of Worms

  CHAPTER 14 - The Rules of the Game

  Rule #1: The Truth Is Not a Matter of Fact; It Is a Product of Consensus.

  Rule #2: Never Get Stuck With the Buck.

  Rule #3: The Assistant of Your Enemy Is Your Friend.

  Rule #4: Even the Paranoid Have Enemies.

  Rule #5: Always Be More Polite Than Your Enemy.

  CHAPTER 15 - Conflict Resolution

  CHAPTER 16 - Cigars With Criminals

  CHAPTER 17 - The Propaganda War

  CHAPTER 18 - Memorandum

  CHAPTER 19 - A New Wind

  CHAPTER 20 - Turf Warriors

  CHAPTER 21 - Exit Strategy

  CHAPTER 22 - Just When I Thought I Was Out . . .

  CHAPTER 23 - The Clash of Civilized Nations

  CHAPTER 24 - Weapons of Mass Distraction

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 25 - There Will Be Blood

  CHAPTER 26 - The Road to Hell

  CHAPTER 27 - Saddam’s Secret List

  CHAPTER 28 - Boomerang

  CHAPTER 29 - The Man Who Could Have Been a Millionaire

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to my father, André Soussan.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank my editors, Ruth Baldwin and Carl Bromley, and my agents, Jennifer Gates and Mary Beth Chappell, whose advice and direction helped guide this project to completion. A number of talented friends and colleagues also provided valuable feedback, advice, or encouragement at critical stages in my writer’s journey. They include Audun Huslid, Jad Mouawad, Hedi Kim, Daniel Cruise, Liz Bowyer, Robert Whitcomb, Terry Collymore, Celeste Katz, David Guç, Web Stone, Robert McKee, Tamara Chalabi, Keith Fleming, Amir Afkhami, Chris Chappell, Megan Kingery, Joanne Dickow, Patrick Arfi, Jacques Baudouin, Denis Poncet, Hesi Carmel, Ami Horowitz, Matt Groff, Tanaz Esheghian, Inna Khavinson, Douglas Rogers, Paul Rothenberg, Shannon Godwin, Scott Anderson, and Judy Goldstein.

  Afsane Bassir Pour, of Le Monde, and Richard Roth, of CNN, offered me my first opportunities to cover the United Nations for the media, when I was just out of college. One reason they considered me was that I had cofounded and edited The Brown Journal of World Affairs, at Brown University, thanks to the support offered by the Watson Institute and grants from Vartan Gregorian and Artemis Joukwosky. Together with my academic mentors, Terrence Hoppman, Jarat Chopra, Pierre Hassner, and Marie-Claude Smouts, they helped me develop a strong interest in world affairs, and the confidence necessary to think for myself.

  I am grateful to the staff at The Writers’ Room, where most of this book was written, for offering a productive space in which to work in New York. My students at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs unwittingly helped me more than they can imagine with questions for which I am in their debt. Finally, I wish to thank the many UN staff whose dedication and competence may not be the focus of this tale, but whose example gave me hope that our world organization can in fact be held to higher standards.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wish I could say none of the events in this story ever happened. Unfortunately, they now form part of our collective history. Information pertaining to wrongdoing by particular individuals named herein is drawn from the publicly available findings of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Oil-for-Food Program (www.iic-offp.org). It is important for the reader to understand that none of the persons referred to in this story should be considered guilty of criminal behavior unless they have been sentenced in a court of law.

  Some names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals who were not already in the public sphere. I took the liberty to describe the events and the attitudes that defined this critical era in world affairs without the pretense of cold objectivity. I was an emotional participant in this story. As I recall certain events from memory, I am also aware that others may disagree with details of how these unfolded. The characters who appear herein cannot be defined only by their mistakes, or by their portrayal in this or other written works. I too made mistakes, and had ample opportunity to change my mind about important issues throughout this story. And thus I hope that our collective misadventures, our moments of ridicule or tragedy, will not be judged too harshly, for we were merely ordinary, flawed individuals faced with extraordinary circumstances.

  CHAPTER 1

  Whistleblower

  DELTA SHUTTLE, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK CITY

  T0 WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 28, 2004

  I never imagined it would come to this. Yet here I was, sitting on a plane headed for Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to testify before Congress in less than two hours. I would be speaking about a rather strange affair. Margaret Warner, of the PBS NewsHour, described it as the “largest financial scandal in UN history.” Fred Barnes, of Fox News, went further, calling it the worst scandal in the history of mankind.

  I fiddled with the ventilation knob. My armpits were drenched. I sat back, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. How the hell had I landed myself in this mess?

  “Should be a nice day, huh?”

  I opened my eyes and looked at my neighbor. I knew from the instant he sat down that he was a compulsive airplane conversationalist, and I had tried my best to avoid his eager gaze.

  “Not a cloud in the sky,” he added, pointing out the window and encouraging me to check for myself.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Should be a smooth flight.”

  I reached inside my bag, withdrawing my iPod and the speech I was supposed to give in a couple of hours. I needed to go over my remarks one last time.

  “So!” he said. “What brings you to D.C.?”

  Did he not see I had plugged in my earphones?

  “I have to . . . give this speech,” I said.

  “Really? Where?”

  “At the House International Relations Committee.”

  “Huh. . . . Are you like an expert or something?”

  “No, not exactly. I used to work for the UN. I just need to focus on this for a bit, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course, of course. . . .”

  I could feel his gaze over my shoulder as I tried to concentrate on my text. I took a deep breath and exhaled irritably.

  “You feeling nervous?” he asked. He had a knowing grin on his chubby face.

  “Yeah, a bit. But I’d feel much better if I could—”

  “Have you seen the studies they did?”

  “Who? What studies?”

  “You know, about people’s fears? Apparently, public speaking ranks number one.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You know what number two is?”

  “No.”

  “Death! Ha ha ha ha!”

  With that, he slipped out a copy of the New York Post and started flipping the pages noisily. I turned up the volume on my iPod and forced myself to
concentrate. I was on the second page of my testimony when he poked me on the shoulder.

  “What? ”

  “Is that you?” he asked, pointing at an article in his tabloid. It had a big fat title:

  U.N. BIG WILL TELL ALL ON OILY SCAM

  “Oh,” I said. “No, that wouldn’t be me. Nobody would call me a ‘UN big’ . . . do you mind if I have a look, though?”

  To my knowledge, no senior UN official had agreed to testify yet, so I was curious to know whom the article was talking about. As I read the story, by Niles Lathem, I had a shock:

  WASHINGTON—Michael Soussan, a former program coordinator for the $100 billion fund, is expected to be the star witness of a House International Relations Committee hearing looking into Saddam’s gigantic $10.1 billion rip-off.

  Committee sources said Soussan, now a New York-area writer, is expected to give the first, under oath, public account from an insider about how top U.N. officials were aware of Saddam’s oil smuggling and kickback schemes. . . .

  I put the paper down and stared blankly into space.

  “Do you know this guy?” asked my neighbor.

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Sounds like he’s ready to spill the beans.”

  “Yeah. . . . Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  As soon as I got up, a stewardess came running.

  “Sir, please return to your seat. The pilot has put the seat belt sign on.”

  “But I really need to go, I—”

  “I’m sorry, sir, please return to your seat.”

  “Come on, lady, let him go,” my neighbor intervened. “He’s testifying in Congress today. He’s nervous.”

  I wanted to strangle him.

  “I’m fine . . . it’s fine!” I sat back down, turned up the music full blast, and looked out the window.

  It had been seven years since I left Washington, D.C., to embark on this unusual journey. The UN Oil-for-Food operation had been set up in 1996 to provide for the humanitarian needs of Iraq’s civilians who had suffered dramatic shortages of basic necessities under the stringent economic sanctions adopted in 1990, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

  While diplomats jousted for the moral high ground in New York, lecturing one another on international law, those same laws were being violated methodically behind the scenes through an ever-increasing flow of crooked deals that cheated Iraq’s civilians out of an enormous share of their country’s wealth. Billions had gone missing from right under our nose, and we weren’t even sure how many. Soon, this collective fiasco would be investigated by a high-level anticorruption commission. France, the United States, and Russia would get embroiled in a mutual blame game. Bureaucrats at the United Nations would turn on one another. Hundreds of lobbyists would be called up to defend some 2,300 companies that had broken the law in order to gain favor with Saddam Hussein. The trickle of damning revelations would soon turn into a flood. A judge investigating the fraud in Iraq was killed in an explosion, and several sources used by investigators on the ground mysteriously disappeared. Some influential diplomats, politicians, and other power brokers would go to jail. It promised to be a political bloodbath.

  Some people blamed me for helping set this whole debacle in motion after I became the first former employee of the UN operation to call for an independent investigation in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal the previous month. My intervention had snowballed, and I received myriad requests for interviews, including from CNN, Fox, ABC, the BBC, and many others—most of which I turned down. But when I received the invitation from Congress, I decided to accept.

  My position, at the crossroads of pressing humanitarian concerns, big-power politics, and multibillion-dollar business interests, provided an unusual vantage point on the Iraq conflict. While much of the international community was hypnotized by the “hunt” for Saddam’s proscribed weapons, my colleagues and I had our eyes on the human dimension of the conflict.

  In Iraq, we became familiar with a society in which youngsters had less education than their parents, where the infrastructure was rotten beyond repair, where criminal gangs close to the regime ruled all the country’s trade and smuggling routes, and where the only thing that held society together was fear. In 2003 the United States and its allies had set out to create a “new Iraq” on the ruins of the old one. This ambitious agenda underestimated the damage that had been done to the Iraqi people in the thirteen years since the Gulf War.

  In New York, we saw the institution that was supposed to stand for international order break its own laws for seven years. The UN Security Council operated much like a drug cartel, fighting over access to Iraq’s oil and, in so doing, letting the Iraqi dictator cannibalize his own country in partnership with our most respectable international corporations.

  A strange conspiracy of silence had prevailed for many years. The Clinton and Bush administrations had been intimately aware of the massive fraud. French and Russian government officials had directly participated in it, as had officials from all over Europe, South Africa, Australia, India, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, among others. Reuters, the Associated Press, and most news organizations with correspondents in Iraq had ample evidence as well. As did we, the humanitarian community of the United Nations.

  I was determined to break that silence now. But I couldn’t care less how the unfolding “scandal” ranked in the annals of history. It was merely the third act of a tragic story that highlighted some of the core flaws of our international system and the frightening, corrupting power of the black elixir that fuels the world economy. From the end of the cold war to the onset of the “war on terror,” the Iraq conflict can be looked at as a mirror reflecting the evolving nature of our global political power game.

  In order to explain what happened, I would need to describe the events and the attitudes that prevailed at the United Nations during this critical era in international affairs—a time during which I came of age.

  As I stepped out of the plane in Washington, D.C., my neighbor insisted we exchange business cards. When he read mine, he looked up at me.

  “So it’s you! The guy in the article. . . .”

  Well, I can’t say I recognized myself in the article’s depiction. I had never thought of myself as a whistleblower. I had stayed loyal as long as I could.

  I knew there would be no going back on this decision. But it was a lonely road. Between the UN-bashers who were hyping up my appearance and the UN-apologists who resented it, I felt everyone in this affair somehow fell into rank behind interest groups that could protect them—except me. What I had to say would not flatter any side in this conflict.

  The choice, as I saw it, was between cynicism and candor. If all of us insisted that we really cared about the people of Iraq as much as we professed, then this story could only be described as a conspiracy of saints. Alternatively, we could accept that what made this episode in recent history possible was not so much the lies we told one another but the lies we told ourselves.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 2

  Do-Gooder

  SAIPAN, SPRING 1997

  Four hundred women crammed into a warehouse. The deafening sound of sewing machines. Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shirts piling up in large bins at the far end of the factory floor, ready to be shipped out. The shirts were labeled “Made in the USA.” But what the label did not specify was that the women working in this sweatshop—young Filipinas and Chinese girls, for the most part—were paid far less than the U.S. minimum wage. A loophole in the law allowed the U.S. commonwealth island of Saipan, located somewhere near nowhere in the Pacific Ocean, to import foreign workers and pay them dirt to make shirts.

  The point of my presence at the scene was to help these factory owners get away with exploitation.

  “See? Working conditions are not as horrible as the press would have us believe,” said Pat, the team leader of the Congressional delegation that had come here to “witness conditions on the ground”—as well as t
o play golf, enjoy the amenities of a five-star luxury resort, take sightseeing tours, and stop over for two days in Hawaii on the flight back to Washington, D.C. The junket’s only uncomfortable moment was the present one. Walking through the aisles of the sweatshop like noblemen from a different century, dressed in khakis and blue shirts, we observed the girls at work. I noticed that they did not look up at us. They could not afford a moment of reprieve. One girl was sewing zippers, and after I insisted on catching her eye, she paused—just long enough to acknowledge me but not long enough to cause a stoppage in the chain of events that made shmattes into clothes. By the time I managed a smile, she was back at work.

  “It’s clean, well lit,” Pat continued. And the members of the Congressional junket nodded. We were all eager to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. A special treat awaited us at the end of the tour: discounted clothes. A chance to shop directly from the sweatshop! And to distract us from any sinking feeling such direct sponsorship of exploitation might cause, we had a field trip planned for the afternoon. We were going to visit the neighboring island of Tinian, to see the airfield from which the United States launched the Enola Gay on its mission to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.

  “Fact-finding missions.” That’s what these free, lobbyist-operated vacations were called in Congress. Our job was to drop little one-liners here and there: “These girls come from very poor families.” “It’s a lot of money for them here.” “They work a few years, and when they go back they can buy houses for their entire family.” “The stories of mistreatment are exaggerated.” “If they had to be paid U.S. minimum wage, the factory would go out of business, and then what? The island’s economy would collapse. Then what?”

  But we knew, and our nodding counterparts knew, that this was exploitation. These girls lived in barracks, shopped at the company store, and could be kicked off the island anytime it pleased their owners. If they were abused, they could run to the authorities. But given that the governor of Saipan was in the factory owner’s pocket, the girls knew better.