Backstabbing for Beginners Page 16

  I felt like a suspect in an old Columbo episode. Just one last question. . . .

  Given the choice, many of us (especially those with a social life) would rather have submitted to a colonoscopy than have strangers peer through our most intimate, silly, ranting e-mails. Especially with my group of friends, who never hesitated to recount a night of debauchery in every detail the next day or to send around pornographic attachments just for the hell of it.

  The investigator—a sharp-looking woman with strict hair and an impeccable business suit—was flanked by two silent aides, who took notes with electronic pens directly on the screens of their laptops whenever I opened my mouth. It was quite unnerving. The woman had an air of competence about her. She was looking at a printout, which she had whipped out of her file just as I thought the interview was about to end. She took her time to review its contents as I sat at the edge of my seat.

  “In all fairness, I should probably let you read this first.” She slid the sheet of paper across the table.

  In all fairness? Why is she saying “in all fairness”? That’s something you say to a GUILTY PERSON!

  I grabbed the e-mail and started reading through it. As I did, my mind went back to that morning, that horribly embarrassing morning. . . .

  I knew it would be a bad day as soon as I woke up. My neck was painfully contorted. I swallowed two Excedrin and looked at myself in the mirror. My tongue was white, dry as sandpaper. I was shaving when I noticed it: a huge hickey on my neck.

  The New York dating scene had its dangers. The woman who had found it necessary to leave this gory-looking suction mark on my neck the night before had seemed like a perfectly reasonable person at the beginning of the evening. She had mentioned something about her medication not reacting so well with alcohol, but I hadn’t really paid attention because her foot had already begun to play games under the table. When I heard the word “medication” I inquired if she was sick, and she replied, “No, it’s for my brain. I have a chemical imbalance in my brain.”

  This was before the Sambuca shots she ordered after our second bottle of Pinot Grigio. She then went to the bathroom and came back with what seemed like a completely new personality. Her eyes were wide open, her fingers often rubbed up against her nose, and her speech had accelerated to the point where I found it hard to grasp when she was switching topics. When we walked out, she had a brilliant idea.

  “Let’s go sing karaoke! Come on, just for one song!”

  When we finally walked out of our private singing booth, it was 4:30 a.m. and I had fingernail scratch marks on my back. It was there, on the street, that she pulled away from a kiss, gave me a strange look, and suddenly bit into my neck. The blue mark I noticed the next morning was only slightly smaller than a hockey puck.

  My secretary was the first to notice it. I noticed her noticing it, and she noticed me noticing her noticing it. So she controlled her smile. But as soon as she left my office, the word started spreading.

  “Mickey has a hickey!” And it rhymed.

  I did not think it was funny. I was hungover and paranoid and nauseous. I settled in at my desk and tried to draft a press release, a rather difficult task for the one neuron I had left in my brain. One by one, my office mates found reasons to come into my office to check out my stupid hickey. It was a zero-credibility day.

  Then the call came from Pasha’s office, which I let slide directly to voicemail. Fortunately, he left a clear message.

  “Where the fack are you? Come to my office, right now! ”

  Uh-oh . . .

  I immediately called back and got his secretary.

  “Hey, I just got a call from—”

  “Yes, Michael, he’s expecting you.”

  “He didn’t sound in a good mood,” I probed.

  “You can say that again,” said Pasha’s secretary.

  Shit. I hung up, picked up a notebook, and ran down the stairs of my building. Shit, shit, shit. I crossed First Avenue in the rain, passed the security checkpoint of the UN Secretariat building, and ran toward the elevator yelling, “Hold it!” but failing to inspire anybody inside to press a button, much less stick out a hand between the sliding doors.

  The checkered black-and-white floor of the UN lobby is quite slippery when wet, and I was forced to hold on to a stranger’s shoulder in order to avoid losing my balance at the end of my run.

  “Sorry,” I said, not knowing quite what to add, as the stranger readjusted his shoulder pad, which now had a wet handprint on it. He didn’t reply. Just glanced at me condescendingly, then looked away. Then he did a double take to reexamine my neck. I must have pressed the elevator call button twenty times before we finally got a ding!

  On my way up to Pasha’s fifteenth-floor office, I tried to organize my defense. Clearly, I had done something to anger him. The question was: what?

  It could have been lots of things. We had recently been informed that the Danish guard the Iraqis wanted to throw in jail had escaped. He had done so exactly as we had planned. His Danish colleagues from Iraqi Kurdistan had driven down to Baghdad under the pretext that they were about to go on vacation, and in the middle of the night they had rolled him up in a carpet and loaded him into their trunk. After hiding their rolled-up pal in a hole they had carved out under the back seat of their SUV, they drove north, got past the military checkpoints without getting searched, and dropped their friend off in Turkey before anybody noticed he was gone.

  Did Pasha find out I had been in on this plan? Who could possibly have told him? No, it had to be something else. . . .

  Then it hit me. A few days ago, a Swiss magistrate had written to us revealing that a company doing business under the Oil-for-Food program was in fact a front (a legal entity set up for the sole purpose of doing a particular transaction while shielding the people behind the deal). Whoever sets up a front company wants to make sure the public will never be aware of their business. In his fax, the Swiss magistrate had asked us if it was legal, under the UN guidelines, to disguise the origins of the companies exporting goods to Iraq using ghost fronts.

  It was a simple question, but somehow nobody could give me a straight answer, and the UN’s Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) did not respond to my requests for advice. How was I to write a reply for Pasha to send to the Swiss magistrate? I decided to dive into the complex regulations governing the Oil-for-Food operation in search of an answer. Not surprisingly, I found it was absolutely illegal for a company to use fronts to export goods to Iraq, especially if these shell structures were not based in the country where the company operated. With that, I drafted a reply and sent it to OLA for clearance before I would submit it to Pasha for signature.

  “Don’t open that can of worms!” came the e-mail reply from one colleague.

  Vladimir Golytsin, the Russian lawyer assigned to Oil-for-Food issues, agreed. He argued that the best course of action was not to reply at all. According to him, the Swiss magistrate had no business addressing such a query to the UN. Golytsin even suggested that the Swiss magistrate had political motives for his query.

  Political motives? I thought the Swiss were the neutral guys. It sounded like I needed to consult Spooky.

  “This is very serious stuff, Michael,” said Spooky. “This should be handled at the highest level! The secretary general should be informed immediately!”

  “Why, what’s the big deal?” I asked. “This Swiss guy is asking us what our rules say, and I’m telling him what the rules say. Why does this have to get complicated?” I was getting increasingly confused.

  “Because this is the first time we’ve been officially notified of this phenomenon,” said Spooky.

  “What phenomenon?” I asked.

  “The Iraqis are using front companies in order to get kickbacks,” said Spooky.

  “How does that work?”

  “Well, it’s pretty simple,” said Spooky. “The Iraqi Health Ministry will sign a contract with Company A to import medicines.”

  “Right. . . .�
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  “But Company A is not a pharmaceutical company.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Company A is, say, a Jordanian friend of the Iraqi health minister.”

  “OK. . . .”

  “So Company A buys medicines from Company B, a real pharmaceutical company, then sells the goods to Iraq at inflated prices, yields a profit, and splits the money with the Iraqi minister.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yes. I knew this was going on,” said Spooky, “but now we have something tangible to work with. An official letter from the Swiss authorities.”

  “OK,” I said, “but here’s the problem. Legal Affairs won’t sign off on my draft, and Pasha won’t sign the letter unless Legal signs off on it. So we’re stuck!”

  Spooky nodded his head in quiet frustration. He had obviously been aware of this problem for quite some time, and I felt mounting resentment that he had not let me in on this issue. Why did I have to stumble on it like that? I thought he and I had a deal to keep each other in the loop!

  Trevor knew as well as I did that our fundamental mandate required us to report any diversions of cash from the humanitarian program. Trevor was not one to dissuade me from that. He had briefed me on this aspect of our mission from the very beginning and had put his career at risk several times in the past by pushing for exactly this kind of reporting. Only he had been ignored. And his scheduled promotion had been delayed more than once. Trevor had to pick his battles, and from the look on his face, this had not come at an opportune time.

  He looked at me apologetically. I nodded my acceptance. But what were we to do now? Trevor’s eyes converged on a fixed point above my head; he took a deep breath and made a decision.

  “I’ll call Pasha right now,” said Trevor, picking up his phone.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  A few seconds later, Trevor had Pasha on the line. “Yes . . . it’s . . . ha, ha, ha . . . yes, sir! . . . yes . . . I’m sorry? . . . aha . . . well, sir, it’s about the issue with the Swiss magistrate . . . right . . . but it’s rather important, because you see . . . yes . . . but, sir . . . yes . . . yes . . . right . . . bye-bye now.”

  Spooky, as Pasha had no doubt called him, hung up with a desperate look on his face.

  “He never listens to me anymore,” he said.

  Had Trevor been “defanged,” as Pasha had promised the Iraqi foreign minister he might be? The thought crossed my mind, but I had no time to deconstruct Pasha’s pattern of behavior toward his chief analyst.

  It was beginning to look like the Swiss magistrate was not going to get a reply. If Pasha didn’t take Spooky’s advice on this one, it meant he was in no mood to make a fuss. We would hide behind procedure, which allowed us not to answer questions unless they came directly from a government, through official channels. In other words, the Swiss magistrate would be asked to direct his question toward his own government, which, at the time, was not a member of the UN (Switzerland joined the UN in 2002).

  In essence, we would be telling the Swiss magistrate to “get lost” in polite UN-speak. And it would be my job to do so.

  I went back to my office and shot an angry e-mail off to the lawyers at OLA, pointing out that many days had now gone by and we needed a clear answer from them.

  “IS THE USE OF FRONT COMPANIES LEGAL OR ILLEGAL?” I asked, in all caps. The Russian lawyer I was speaking to had about seven grades of seniority over me and didn’t appreciate being addressed in caps. So he simply didn’t reply.

  I didn’t expect I would be reading a printout of this e-mail exchange while under questioning years later. But I would never regret putting my question to the UN’s lawyer in caps. It was a simple yet fundamental question that had a yes or no answer. If my superiors could not get themselves to answer it, I thought, I might as well do this myself. I decided simply to pick up the phone and call the Swiss magistrate directly. I dialed and reached some kind of legal aide, to whom I explained the answer to the magistrate’s question. The use of front companies was illegal, but I couldn’t get my boss to put it on paper. Why not? Because, um, we had protocol issues, and they would probably get a letter explaining that. But in any case, the answer was already on paper, so to speak, since it was written into the UN resolution documents that made up our mandate, and these documents were public—even available on the web.

  “Oh, and don’t quote me,” I added.

  My interlocutor was somewhat puzzled that a UN official would worry about getting on record to confirm the UN’s own publicly available laws. But he was nice enough not to insist.

  I had answered the query in Pasha’s place, sidetracked the UN Office of Legal Affairs, and communicated with an “outside entity” about a subject that Spooky himself thought should be handled at “the highest level.” I had broken the chain of command.

  I did this for two very contradictory reasons. The first was related to my conscience; the second, to my sense of loyalty. On the one hand, I would have hated myself if a Swiss court case concluded that the UN was uncooperative in answering a simple, straightforward question. On the other hand, I sensed that Pasha would be perfectly glad to avoid expressing himself on this issue, so as to maintain plausible deniability.

  But offering a superior the option of deniability also means taking the fall if things go wrong. As I racked my brain trying to figure out why an angry Pasha had suddenly called me to his office that morning, the Swiss episode ranked number one on my list of possibilities. The nightmare scenario quickly took shape in my mind. Surely, the Swiss magistrate must have initiated some kind of probe, and now it was all coming back to bite me in the ass before the UN even had time to send an official reply. The UN Security Council would take up the matter, the United States would go bonkers, and the whole program would grind to a halt—all because of me!

  When I reached Pasha’s office, I bit my lip before knocking on his door.

  “Yes!”

  I opened the door and stayed at the entrance instead of walking in. Pasha was shaking his head. Uh-oh, here it comes. . . .

  “You’re dressed like a clown!” said Pasha.

  He had a point. I had chosen my shirt based not on how well it matched my suit but on how high the collar was—hoping it would help conceal my hickey. It was yellow, and the left tip of the collar kept flapping upward because it lacked that little piece of plastic that would have kept it straight. I wore it with a blue tie, which would have been fine with a blue suit. But my blue suit was at the dry cleaners, and as I had been running late after my night of debauchery with the chemically imbalanced vampire girl, I had thrown on a thick gray suit I purchased back when I was fifteen pounds fatter.

  Pasha’s taste in clothes was really impeccable, and it visibly pained him to see me looking like a clown. He got up, walked toward me, and snapped my collar back down before proceeding to adjust my tie.

  “Let’s go! And get yourself a new suit. I can’t take you to the thirty-eighth floor looking like this!”

  “The . . . the thirty-eighth floor?”

  We were going to Kofi Annan’s office. Oh, God. . . . I walked with my head tilted slightly to the left, in an attempt to hide the mark on my neck. But in the elevator ride up, Pasha noticed it.

  “What the fack is this?” he asked, pressing his finger into my neck.

  “Aw! . . . I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Who did you fack?”

  “Well, I . . . erm . . . you don’t know her.”

  “Tsk . . . tsk . . . tsk . . .” Pasha shook his head, then added, “You should have put some powder on it!”

  I nodded, feeling truly idiotic.

  It was my first time setting foot on the thirty-eighth floor. An eerie silence prevailed there. People moved stiffly and spoke in hushed tones. Well, except for Pasha, who slapped people on the shoulder and called them “fackers.”

  How many UN secretary generals had Pasha worked for? He had joined the organization before I was born, in 1965. He was part of the
building, and even Kofi Annan’s aides appeared a little scared of him.

  The top floor of the UN building is a rather impractical location for the secretary general’s office. If the UN were a ship (which is how it looks from the angle that journalists often pick as background to their stand-ups), the secretary general’s office would be all the way up in the mast. The building is so flat that the wind actually causes it to bend, as evidenced by the subtle creaking sounds that permeate the structure on stormy days.

  The security guard saluted Pasha with extra stiffness. As UN security coordinator, my boss was also this man’s boss. We proceeded to take a left, walking down the corridor to Kofi Annan’s office. We arrived before the desk of Elisabeth Lindenmayer, Annan’s executive assistant (and his former French teacher), who lit up on command as we approached. I assumed she always did this with visitors coming to see her boss, but I didn’t expect that she would start grilling me with questions as we waited for Annan to be disposed. She seemed like a very charming and intelligent lady, but I was a bit confused by her line of questioning. I felt like she was profiling me. And it got pretty intimate, too, when she started asking me where I was from, where I had studied, and why I had a French-sounding name if I was from Denmark.

  Pasha wagged his finger at her and said, “Don’t steal this one from me. He’s not trained yet!” For the first time that morning, I began to entertain the possibility that I might not be in trouble after all. Lindenmayer smiled at Pasha but was no less curious about my background. Younger staffers were so rare that we became a valuable commodity. The zeal and the energy of an upstart could do wonders for bureaucrats who knew how to steer them, and the UN’s recruitment system was so averse to hiring anybody who didn’t already have years of experience at the UN that when younger staff made their way in, usually through some sort of glitch in the UN’s recruitment matrix, they were soon fought over by senior managers. Lindenmayer obviously had her pick, since she was sitting on the thirty-eighth floor, so it was rather flattering that she would take any interest in my profile at all. But my answers must have sounded a bit confused, because, well, I was a bit confused. I still didn’t know what I was doing up here, and I still worried that the front-company snafu might be about to blow up in my face in a most high-profile manner.