Backstabbing for Beginners Page 15

  “So just give me a facking projection!” said Pasha. “How much money do you think they can make in six months?”

  “Mmmaybeee around four . . . four or five billiuns, some sing like zat,” said the Frenchman, sounding extremely unsure of himself.

  Pasha turned to the Russian.

  “And you . . . why you never talk? Do you agree?”

  “It dipiends vuot about dzia price, but I siyenk my kholieg is corriect.”

  To which the Frenchman added, “But pleeze dun’t queute us. We cannut be ze source for zis number.”

  Pasha nodded and did that thing with his bushy eyebrows that meant the Double-O’s could leave his office now before he got any angrier. If we couldn’t quote our own UN oil overseers, who could we quote? The fact is, these guys did not really see Pasha as their boss. Their posts were so political that they felt loyalty only to their home countries.

  “Can you believe these guys?” said Pasha.

  Well, at least we had some kind of estimate, a number to work with: $4 billion to $5 billion per six months. So we decided to aim for the midpoint between the two numbers and settled on a budget of about $4.5 billion every six months. Cutting right through the middle seemed like a safe bet. The British colonial authorities employed the same logic when they designed the borders of the region, often cutting lines right through the midpoint between capitals, which is how maps of the Middle East contain so many straight (and continuously contested) lines. In a sense, not much had changed since colonial times. Today we, a group of UN bureaucrats, had become the czars of Iraq’s economy; and based on the vague advice of the Double-O’s, Iraq’s budget would be $4.5 billion per semester, or $9 billion a year.

  After further negotiations with Halliday, who raged that we had sabotaged his “bottom-up approach” and stabbed the Iraqi people in the back, we ended up raising the budget to $5.2 billion every six months, or $10.4 billion per year. The UN’s own annual budget was around $2.2 billion. Syria’s annual budget revenues were less than $7 billion. We were essentially lifting all civilian sanctions on Iraq.

  “This is never going to fly,” said Dracula. “The Americans will never agree to it.”

  We looked at one another in silence. It was around Christmastime. We were sitting around in the conference room, exhausted by a month of constant disputes, waiting for a pizza to be delivered to the office. It was around 10:30 at night and pissing rain outside.

  Pasha returned from the restrooms with the pizza. He had intercepted the delivery man en route and slapped him on the neck by surprise, causing him to drop the pizzas in the corridor, so the opened box looked a bit chaotic, with some slices overturned and others missing the cheese, which had slid off and stuck to the carton lid.

  “Here . . . eat!” said Pasha, as if speaking to famished sled dogs. Not that we felt very different. Pasha had driven us hard through the past two months, keeping us in the office late and throwing fits every time “facking Halliday” sent in a new project.

  As we munched, Pasha looked at each of us quizzically; at some point he popped the question. “So that’s it? $5.2 billion?”

  Everybody nodded except Dracula.

  “What?” said Pasha.

  “It’s never going to fly,” said Dracula, as he had all week.

  “So you have a better number for me?” asked Pasha.

  “No,” said Dracula. “I think it’s the right number, but it might not pass the Council.”

  “Unless anybody has a better idea, that’s it. That’s the magic number,” said Pasha.

  “Inshallah,” said Dracula.

  “Spooky?” asked Pasha.

  “It’s a tough one. Her Majesty’s Government might buy it, but the Americans, I don’t know . . .”

  “Kid?”

  “Maybe we can . . .”

  “Shadap!”

  All right, I could bear being the object of comic relief, but the fact was, I was an integral part of a small team that had very limited competence on the matter to begin with, so after a round of laughter, Pasha nodded at me again to share my thought.

  “Maybe we could sound out the Americans?” I said. “I mean, we’d have to share the same info with all the big five, but if the U.S. doesn’t challenge us, who else will?”

  “They’re called the P5, Michael, not the big five,” Spooky whispered in my ear as Pasha considered the option of sharing the magic number with the five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council. The practice is often used, mainly to shield the Secretariat from the embarrassment of making proposals that are immediately trashed by a veto. But Pasha was shaking his head.

  “No,” he said, firmly. “Nobody speaks to anybody outside this room.”

  “But they’ve already called and asked,” said Spooky.

  “Nobody talks,” said Pasha, looking each of us in the eye, one after the other, the way Tony Soprano does when he needs everyone in his gang to be on the same page. Pasha then threw his napkin back on the table and stood up.

  “Nobody talks,” he repeated as he walked out. “Let me handle this.” Pasha liked to play his cards close to his chest. He knew that if he announced the magic number in advance, the United States would raise hell. It would be far easier for the United States to challenge us face-to-face than in front of the entire Security Council. So I concluded that Pasha was smart to reject my proposal. His plan was to drop a bombshell on the Security Council and let the states fight it out amongst themselves. The French and the Russians and the Chinese would welcome our proposals, for sure. And the United States and Britain would find themselves on the defensive, having to come up with arguments for why Iraq should not benefit from this or that humanitarian project. They would inevitably look heartless, something any government prefers to do in private rather than in public.

  “The Americans have other ways of finding out,” said Spooky, eyeing the wall.

  “Sure,” said Pasha, “but as long as they don’t hear it from us directly, they can’t discuss it with us, can they?”

  Logical. The United States was not supposed to be listening in on UN staff. But sure enough, the next day, the U.S. deputy ambassador and an aide came storming into our office all red in the face, demanding to be told the magic number. Pasha played dumb, saying he couldn’t tell them since he didn’t yet know it himself.

  The U.S. diplomats walked out even more furious than when they walked in. They went to the secretary general’s office, only to get the runaround again. So they sent less important officials to try to get us to speak to them one-on-one. But we had our marching orders. Officially, they were told that we were still identifying which projects to include in our proposals, and in a very real sense we were. We just knew what number these proposals were supposed to add up to.

  Hours before submitting the report to the printer, I got it into my head to run a check on the numbers to see if they added up to the total figure we were about to recommend. It turned out they did not. I barged into Pasha’s office in a state of absolute panic. Either we were missing a project or we had taken one out without changing the total. Pasha went absolutely bonkers. There was obviously a limit to how much incompetence the UN could get away with, and having Kofi Annan appear in front of the Security Council with a report that didn’t add up just about crossed that line.

  With the clock ticking furiously loud, I sat down at my desk to try to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, I was a Microsoft Excel virgin. Besides, numbers have never been my forte. I could hardly trust myself with figuring out the tip on a bar check, and here I was trying to fix the annual budget for an entire country. Having Pasha, Cindy, Dracula, and Spooky breathing down my neck while I tried to manipulate the spreadsheet didn’t make my work any easier. But I was the only young person around, and everybody always assumes young people are better with computers. I finally got the UN treasurer on the phone and conferenced in our office in Baghdad to cross-check some of the information. An hour before our deadline, I thought all was lost. I had ide
ntified the problem, but I couldn’t get the spreadsheet to do what I wanted it to do—and the little Microsoft “paper-clip guy” in the corner of my screen kept distracting me with viciously useless and doubt-provoking questions. I made a mental note to track down the programmer who had conceived that spineless little paper-clip motherfucker and assassinate him.

  I finally called a friend of mine who worked at a bank. Letting a private-sector friend in on numbers that some firms would pay lots of money to get their paws on was a risk I took only as a last resort. After he finished laughing at how clueless I was in operating a rather basic spreadsheet, he guided me through to completion in a New York minute.

  The spreadsheet was the most important page in the report. It outlined how the money would be distributed among the different Iraqi ministries, which operated in the south and center of Iraq, and among the nine UN agencies that were in charge of buying goods for the Kurdish regions in the north. The rest of the report contained lengthy descriptions of the state of each of Iraq’s economic sectors, the needs identified by our observers, and the kinds of projects that needed to take priority if Iraq was to regain the semblance of a functioning economy. There was much more information than the ambassadors sitting on the Security Council cared to read, and even their assistants would complain to us that we had swamped them with too much text. This, of course, was the crux of Pasha’s old-school reporting strategy. By muddying the big picture with an abundance of tiresome and awkwardly committee-drafted technical details, we had significantly reduced the chances of being challenged on the substance or the “science” that helped us finally divide the pie. Most missions would have had to hire troops of specialized PhD holders to sift through all of our statements adequately and prepare focused talking points for debate. Nobody had time for that. As for the numerous promises we made about how we would strengthen our capacity to capably oversee the enormous increase in transactions and shipments, all the United States and Britain could really do was take us at our word. One thing would be certain: there would be no unemployment within the UN system as long as this operation ran. And since all new posts would be paid for by Iraqi money, none of the ambassadors felt the need to question our operational costs or how efficiently our new resources would be used.

  When the report finally went to press, and the magic figure was divulged, U.S. diplomats did little, privately, to hide their anger at what they saw as an act of UN defiance. But what would their response be? How would they vote in the Security Council? The U.S. government now needed to develop an actual policy on how to respond. In the couple of days leading up to the crucial meeting at which Kofi Annan would present the report to the Security Council, the United States scrambled to come up with one. Now it was our turn to invite them out to lunch to try to find out what their government’s reaction would be—and their turn to play their cards close to their chest.

  The meeting was closed to the media and held in the informal chamber of the Security Council. The Iraqis were sitting outside, smoking cigarettes. The media was out in full force, including a special breed of reporters who cover the oil markets. Every member state of the UN wanted to know what would happen, because it meant potential business openings with the oil giant, so the crowd outside the Security Council was filled with smiling information mercenaries.

  On the way in, I passed my former boss, CNN’s Richard Roth. We joked about my crossing over to the “other side.” He asked if I thought our proposals would “fly.” I said I hoped they would but that it all depended on the United States at that point. “Doesn’t it always?” came a quip from the aide to the U.S. ambassador, who enjoyed creeping up on people when they spoke about his country. Poker smiles all around, we entered the little room where Security Council ambassadors hash out deals before going public.

  There was a lot of tension in the air. To my knowledge, the Security Council had never before been involved in decisions that would have such direct commercial repercussions, so the types of pressures its members were under from their domestic constituencies were of a completely different nature from usual. Australian wheat farmers, French pharmaceutical companies, Russian energy giants—all of these powerful lobbying groups had been talking to their governments.

  Ambassadors took turns welcoming the secretary general’s report. Many of them called it “comprehensive,” by which they meant it was too long and convoluted. As often happens in such meetings, the ambassador from the most insignificant country in relation to the issue at hand will launch into long tirades about the moral authority of the United Nations, then trail so far off the subject that others at the table will start taking cellphone calls and exchanging jokes on little pieces of folded paper. In this case, the culprit was assaulted with coughs and nervous tics. Everybody was eager to hear what the United States had to say. There were billions at stake.

  Finally, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson took the floor. Somewhat angrily, he “welcomed” the “comprehensive” report of the secretary general and said his government looked forward to studying it in more detail. They would have many questions for us. Like how we planned to guarantee that all these new goods actually got to the people instead of the regime. How we would strengthen all the financial controls to deal with the increased cash flow. All perfectly good questions, for which we had only the vaguest answers, leaving them with nothing to sink their teeth into.

  After weeks of backroom negotiations, the Security Council reached a verdict. Our recommendations were adopted unanimously, on February 20, 1998, in Resolution 1153.

  Champagne!

  We had successfully steered the largest humanitarian operation in UN history out of port. We had made our case on the force of argument and pushed it through to adoption by making wild promises to the Security Council. Forget that Saddam Hussein had remained defiant in the face of allied bombings. We, the bureaucrats of the United Nations, promised we’d keep an eye on him, even as he was now free to sign contracts for dozens of billions of dollars a year.

  Stepping away from the bustle of the cocktail party that night, I stood facing Gotham’s skyline. We would now be in command of a formidable machine. Our program paid for the work of the UN arms inspectors and had signed contracts with nine UN agencies, each in charge of monitoring one of Iraq’s economic sectors. We had hired Saybolt S.A., a Dutch company, to monitor Iraq’s oil sales, and Lloyd’s Register of London to check the humanitarian imports at the border. Soon, we’d give that monitoring contract to a new company, Cotecna, based in Switzerland. The fact that Kofi Annan’s son Kojo worked at the company that stood to make millions overseeing the imports of goods into Iraq did not seem to faze those who knew about it. Pasha had not deemed it necessary to mention this potentially grave conflict of interest to us, so we’d have to learn about it through the newspapers some time later. Oh, we’d learn a lot of things about our own operation from news reports as time went by. But right now, the media were presenting our expansion as a successful diplomatic solution to a difficult political situation. The positive media coverage had us walking on air as we prepared to supersize our office, both in New York and in Iraq.

  We had some 400 internationals on staff in Iraq and thousands of local employees. Those numbers would grow, as would our office space in New York. We would gobble up entire new floors and monitor billions of dollars in cash flowing through the Banque Nationale de Paris to thousands of companies across the world. There was something strangely exhilarating about it all.

  Spooky stepped out onto the balcony.

  “To making history!” he said, raising his glass to me in cheers. I took a big sip of the warm Champagne and paused for a moment as I tried to formulate the question that had formed in my mind over the past few weeks.

  “Trevor, tell me something . . . and be honest,” I said as we looked out over New York’s bright lights.

  “Honest? I don’t know. If it’s about your tie—”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Yes, Michael?”

&n
bsp; “We’re in way, way over our heads, aren’t we?”

  He replied without looking at me. “Oh, yes. Most definitely.”

  CHAPTER 13

  A Can of Worms

  VOLCKER COMMITTEE INTERROGATION ROOM,

  MIDTOWN MANHATTAN NOVEMBER 19, 2004

  “Do you remember this e-mail exchange?” asked the investigator as he handed me a printout of an e-mail I had written years ago.

  Seven years after we had launched the largest humanitarian enterprise in UN history, I was sitting in a cold conference room high up in a New York City skyscraper being interrogated by members of the Volcker Committee, named after Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, whom the Security Council had appointed to investigate what amounted to a mammoth train wreck. Billions of dollars entrusted to the Oil-for-Food program had vanished, from right under our nose, and suddenly the world had decided to hold us accountable. As one character said to George Clooney in the movie Syriana, in politics, you’re “innocent until investigated.” That movie was based in part on the experience of Robert Baer, a CIA case officer who ended up under investigation in Washington after he helped Jalal Talabani of northern Iraq foment a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein.

  So there I was, feeling less than innocent and wondering what e-mail exchange my interrogator was referring to. As part of its investigation, the Volcker Committee had conducted computer forensics, extracting all of our e-mail communications from the UN database. They were in the process of examining those e-mails meticulously when they suddenly gave me a call. I had already testified with them once. Why were they calling me back?