Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  “It’s not how the game is played,” said Trevor.

  “The game? What game?”

  “Watch your back!” It was the Irish barmaid leaning over my shoulder to lay two dripping pints of beer on the table.

  “These are on the house,” she added, with a cheery wink. It took a moment for my nerves to relax from the sudden shock of her unexpected arrival. When I looked back at Trevor, he was smiling.

  “Like she said, Michael, watch your back. But don’t worry too much about the Iraqis. The worst blows usually come from your own side . . . whatever your side is, Mr. Soussan. That’s not a Danish name, is it?”

  Leaving that last question hanging, he excused himself for the restroom. Time to collect my thoughts. What the hell was Trevor driving at? Two possible answers. Either he was on the verge of a major paranoia attack, of the kind that lands people in straitjackets, or this was serious and we were being watched and intimidated by shadowy Iraqi operatives in New York. And all this was supposed to be part of some “game,” where the most dangerous blows came from one’s “own side.”

  What, I wondered, was my side?

  Of all my new colleagues, Trevor had been the last one to give me face time. I had received mixed messages about the guy from day one. Some people even said he was a spy himself. “He reports to the British,” said one colleague, conspiratorially, after Trevor passed us in the corridor. But another colleague warned me not to take anything coming out of her mouth too seriously. Trevor was on loan to the United Nations from the British Ministry of Defense. There was no secret about that. What could he possibly have to report to the British that we, at the United Nations, should be hiding from them? Britain has a seat on the Security Council, and the Security Council was like our Board of Directors.

  Besides, Trevor didn’t fit the (Hollywood-inspired) image I had of a spy. He was no gadget-wielding, slick-haired, martini-guzzling macho type. Before I had seen him get intense, just earlier, I had considered him a nice, rather low-key fellow. He looked a bit like Elton John, without the wig or the colored glasses. He dressed plainly, in gray suits, sober ties, and gum-sole shoes, which allowed him to slip in and out of someone’s line of vision without leaving a distinct impression. Not that this helped him very much in an office where half the employees were calling him a spook behind his back.

  I had worked hard at getting Trevor to sit down with me. He was the first person I had wanted a briefing from because of his background at the Defense Ministry. My meetings with some of the other colleagues in the office had quickly turned into venting sessions. They all seemed highly frustrated at someone or something, but it was hard to understand who, or what, because they referred to everything in acronyms.

  “The MDOU are offended that the UNOHCI report includes only inputs from the UNGOU. UNICEF [OK, I knew that one] thinks WFP and UNCHS should have a seat at the UNSECOORD meetings.”

  Wuah?

  Complaints about other coworkers were frequent and varied from the substantive to the menial. One reason Trevor was intensely disliked by a large and combative woman named Maria (leaving aside the fact that he was British Anglican and she was Irish Catholic) was that he refused to contribute money to the common coffeepot. The thing was, Trevor was a tea drinker, and he made his own brew using a rusty old electric boiler he kept in his office.

  In contrast to my other colleagues’ digs, which were as nicely appointed as the décor allowed, with family pictures and souvenirs from various parts of the world where their UN careers had taken them, Trevor’s office was spartan and dimly lit. His blinds were always down, and he preferred to use a small desk lamp rather than the fluorescent ceiling lights. The only ornaments on his wall were a large map of Iraq and a small blurry picture, which revealed its contents only upon close examination. It had been taken sometime in the late 1980s. Trevor was in it, standing reverently next to a stiff, gray, tall, and bespectacled person who simply had to be an English diplomat. Across from them was a tall, dark, mustached figure.

  “Is that who I think it is?” I had asked.

  “The man himself,” Trevor had replied.

  If the British government trusted Trevor enough to send him to meetings with Saddam Hussein, maybe I could take him at his word when he said some Iraqi operative had crept into his apartment. Still, it was not the kind of briefing I had expected.

  As an analyst in the British Defense Ministry, Trevor was by far the most knowledgeable person about Iraq at the United Nations. He understood how that country’s electrical grid was set up; the state of its telephone networks and its water and sanitation infrastructure (presumably because all these installations had been targeted by allied bombings during Operation Desert Storm); and, most important, he knew in great detail how the Iraqi regime functioned politically. As an analyst, Trevor had little authority over other staff. But all data and information collected by our UN observers in Iraq came directly to him, and in an environment where exclusive information yields power, Trevor had carved out an influential role for himself. He was not the type who sought to please his superiors, nor did he really need to, because they depended on him entirely when it came to getting the facts straight. But getting the facts straight was one thing. Translating them into UN-speak was another. And that’s where I was expected to come in, to edit Trevor’s straightforward reports under the guidance of our common director, a career UN official from Ethiopia who had a clear idea of what could and could not be said in a UN document.

  Given the need for me to work closely with Trevor, I had sought him out early on. Problem was, the man who had previously briefed Margaret Thatcher about Iraq clearly saw it as a waste of his time to speak to the kid who had knocked on his door one afternoon and attempted to start a conversation by asking him why he kept the lights in his office off all the time. I finally managed to corner him one day, after he had evaded all my previous attempts. His office was filled with mounds of reports and looked alarmingly disorganized. Yet Trevor appeared serene and in control of his little universe. Every time I had knocked on his door he had looked up from his pile of papers with a pleading expression, and I had agreed to reschedule. But not this time. I had just been tapped to accompany the new big boss of the operation on his first mission to the field, and I needed to pick Trevor’s brain before heading to Baghdad.

  So I invited myself to a cup of Trevor’s tea. He was tight-lipped with me at first, and after a half-hour during which I felt like I was trying to open a can of beans with a plastic fork, I decided on a more direct approach.

  “Look, Trevor, I need your help. I talked to all of our colleagues. They speak a language I hardly understand.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Trevor. “UN-speak. Or UN-ese, if you prefer.”

  “Right. It’s like they’re stuck in their own little clusters, bitching about stuff that’s all in acronyms, and I’m not getting the political perspective here. I understand you worked at the British Defense Ministry during the Gulf War.”

  Trevor’s ears perked up at the mention of his former employer.

  “If you brief me now, I promise you a debriefing when I come back from Iraq.”

  Trevor had so far been prohibited from traveling to Baghdad because of his nationality (and, of course, the widely shared assumption that he had been planted inside the UN by the British government in order to spy on Saddam’s regime). I knew that he would find a firsthand account of the situation on the ground invaluable. I had to bargain for it, but I finally got his attention.

  “All right,” he said. “But not here.”

  “Why not?”

  Trevor glanced at the wall, suggestively, then back at me. Was he implying the place was bugged? I glanced at the wall, then back at him, and said, “What’s wrong with your office? I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. I need to know what I’m walking into here.”

  Trevor looked up at me for a moment.

  “Let’s have a beer, you and I,” he said. “I’ll swing by your office at seven.”

&n
bsp; As soon as we stepped out of the building at One UN Plaza, Trevor removed his UN badge from around his neck and slipped it into his coat pocket, urging me, with a discreet nod, to do the same. I was reluctant to do so. I felt incredibly proud to have this badge dangling around my neck. It gave me access to places where normal people would never set foot, and I was kind of enjoying feeling like an international VIP. Like the young medical students who refuse to take off their green scrubs when they go to lunch, I wanted the whole city to know I was a diplomat. But Trevor found the right words: “Come on, you look like a freshman.”

  With that, I slipped my badge into my pocket. At the end of our little talk at the Irish bar, I decided to cast aside my doubts. Whatever the truth of Trevor’s assertions, his would be the last advice I would get before I zipped my suitcase shut.

  “So what does all this mean for my trip tomorrow?” I asked him when he returned from the bathroom. “I mean, so the Iraqis are watching us. I got that. But I am who I am. Can’t change that, and if they don’t like it, too bad. We have a mandate from the Security Council, and I intend to help execu—”

  “What’s our mandate?” asked Trevor. “Do you even understand it?”

  “Sure! I mean, I’ve read the Security Council resolutions. We’re supposed to help the Iraqi people survive the sanctions.”

  “So why doesn’t the UN just lift those sanctions?” Trevor asked, rhetorically.

  He had a point. There was something rather awkward about a mandate that asked us to save the Iraqi people from, well, our own policy of sanctions.

  “The whole idea here is to prevent any money from flowing into Saddam’s pockets. As you can imagine, Saddam will try everything in his power to make sure we fail. And he’s not our only problem. We’re sitting on a big pot of money, Michael. Billions of dollars. It’s more cash than the UN has ever handled. And all sides want to get their paws on it.”

  Trevor waited for me to nod before continuing.

  “So just be aware, Michael. They know who you are, and they’ll be watching you. This program is enormously important to them. Saddam is counting on this operation to erode the sanctions, rebuild his military machine, and break out of his international isolation. He used to be the most powerful man in the Middle East. He intends to become so again. And he has no intention of letting a bunch of UN bureaucrats stand in his way. Do you understand?”

  He had spoken calmly, like an educator, without breaking eye contact.

  “I understand.”

  “So keep your eyes open. Be aware of what goes on around you. And most important, be your own man.”

  My own man? Trevor saw the question mark on my face. His stone face melted into a smile as he waited for me to formulate my thought.

  “How can I be my own man, Trevor? I have a boss. My job is to represent his interests.”

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid your life is about to get a bit more complicated than that,” said Trevor. “Think for yourself, Michael. You’ll be glad you did when the game is up.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Fasten Your Seat Belts

  NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 12, 1997, 5:30 A . M .

  I shut off my alarm clock, sat up in my bed, and turned on CNN. Blaring trumpets accompanied footage of F-15s taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Showdown with Iraq was on. The longest-running reality show in “infotainment” history. The anchorwoman frowned as if to contain her excitement. The United States was on the verge of bombing Saddam Hussein (again) for blocking the work of the UN weapons inspectors.

  On a normal day, the prospect of bombings in Iraq would not have fazed me. We all knew the drill: night-vision fireworks over Baghdad, Pentagon videos shot from the tip of a diving missile, nondescript buildings blowing up, and Saddam declaring victory from a bunker while his people sorted through the rubble outside. But this was not a normal day. In eighteen hours, I would be on the ground in Iraq. Surely, the view from there would be different.

  As I stepped into the shower, I wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of a Tomahawk cruise missile attack. Would we hear it coming? Would there be some kind of siren warning? And if so, what should I do? Jump under a desk?

  I made a note to pack some aspirin.

  I was shaving when the intercom buzzer sent me into a panic. The under secretary general was downstairs, ten minutes early, waiting to pick me up on his way to JFK Airport.

  His name was Benon Sevan, but the staff had nicknamed him Pasha in reference to his reputation as a Byzantine manager. Pasha was the boss of my boss. His appointment had been announced suddenly, a few weeks after I started work, when it occurred to Kofi Annan that the Oil-for-Food operation might soon be handling sums of money that dwarfed the UN’s own yearly budget. The program needed to be helmed by a high-level official, and Pasha was a UN heavyweight, in both rank and appearance.

  Yohannes, my Ethiopian director, was not exactly jumping for joy at the prospect of having Pasha as a boss. Yohannes was a guy I had taken an instant liking to during my job interview. He had hired me “off the street,” so to speak, which meant he didn’t mind investing the time necessary to render me functional within the UN system. Yohannes was normally pretty relaxed and confident, but after his first encounter with Pasha he came back to the office visibly shaken. When I asked how he liked our new overlord, he hesitated before venturing, “He’s a bit . . . unusual.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” he said. “We’re seeing him this afternoon. He wants to go to Iraq immediately, despite the crisis. . . . I’m just glad he’s not taking me with him.”

  “Really. Is he planning to go all by himself?”

  “No. I think you’re going to have to go with him.”

  “Oh.”

  When we showed up at the doorstep of Pasha’s large corner office on the fifteenth floor of the UN Secretariat, the under secretary general sprang up from his seat, walked toward us threateningly, slapped Yohannes on the neck surprisingly hard, nodded at me, and popped his head out his door to yell, “Coffee!” before inviting us to sit on a large leather couch that offered a spectacular view of the East River.

  What followed was a strange briefing in which my director endeavored to outline the complexities of the UN’s responsibilities in Iraq amid constant interruption from Pasha, who appeared highly volatile and prone to unforeseeable mood swings. His elocution was somewhere between a mumble and a blurt, and it got worse when he had a cigar in his mouth. I can’t say I understood much of what he said, except for the word “fack,” which he used often. “I don’t give a fack about Stephanides,” he had kept saying. Joseph Stephanides was one of the UN officials who had helped lay the groundwork for the Oil-for-Food operation, and Pasha, it seemed, wanted him out of his way. Apart from that, I caught zilch of what he said. And I couldn’t even figure out why.

  Was it his accent? He was an Armenian from Cyprus, but I had never had any trouble understanding either Armenians or Cypriots before, so I considered the possibility that the under secretary general might suffer from some kind of speech impediment.

  Despite his highly unusual speech pattern, Pasha exerted a powerful charm on the people around him. A heavyset man, he was the center of gravity of whatever room he was in. Everybody seemed slightly off balance in his presence. His burly demeanor was tempered by his elegant taste in clothing. His smartly tailored suit was perfectly matched by his Hermès tie and Italian moccasins. He carried his imposing frame with surprising grace, gliding along the UN’s corridors at a fast pace, in a manner that kept his upper body at a constant height. When he wasn’t greeting the many UN employees who stopped and bowed at his passage with the kind of reverence normally reserved for royalty, his hands would be flapping at his sides, facing backward, as if paddling through the air as he whisked by.

  His eyes were sharp. They were everywhere at once. Nothing seemed to escape him. When he wasn’t in the midst of a blurry outburst, he observed other peop
le’s body language with keen interest, occasionally raising and lowering his bushy eyebrows behind drifts of smoke from his puffed cigar. He appeared generally suspicious of people, especially if they worked for him. Perhaps this explained why, of all the people Pasha could have chosen to accompany him on his first mission to Iraq, he had picked me, the greenest apple in the shop. His decision caught everyone by surprise. I had been recruited only a month earlier and had yet to settle into the UN bureaucracy. I was twenty-four, enthusiastic as a puppy dog, and fully devoted to the United Nations Charter, a miniature copy of which I kept in my pocket at all times in case a legal question came up and I needed to look up the answer.

  My colleagues immediately nicknamed me “The Kid.” Given the age difference between us, they could have easily nicknamed me The Toddler, so I took to it graciously. And the nickname actually worked in my favor, because it cast me as a nonthreatening character in an office fraught with personal rivalries. This would not last. But in these early days, it made me an attractive candidate to accompany Pasha on his first mission to Iraq.

  Before leaving, I had three days to compile a massive briefing book on Iraq, get my vaccination shots, finalize our itinerary, and conduct a flash survey of where the players in the UN Security Council stood on the issues we were expected to raise with the Iraqi government. I had been so busy with my preparations that I even forgot to get anxious—until the night before our trip, when Trevor freaked me out with his ominous warning that my apartment had been “visited.”

  When I got home, after a few too many drinks with Trevor, I thought of ways I could detect if a visitor had been through my things. Suddenly, everything seemed out of place, but as I foraged through my possessions, I found no clear signs to feed my paranoia. I remembered a trick from a James Bond movie: in one scene, Sean Connery had removed a hair from his scalp, licked it, and placed it on his hotel door. When he came back and the hair was gone, he knew someone had been there in his absence. I experimented with that for a bit. If Trevor was right, and my apartment had been visited, I needed a system to alert me to any recurrences. But my hair, unlike Sean Connery’s, wouldn’t stick to my door, so I abandoned the effort and tried to get some sleep.