Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  No luck there either. I tossed and turned for hours, growing increasingly tense. So much so that the next morning, when I exited my building and saw Pasha’s stretch limousine parked at the curb, engine running, my nervous system laid siege on my senses. With sweaty palms and a lump in my throat, I walked up to the car, opened the door, and peeked inside.

  Pasha sat in the rear, looking like someone had pissed in his cornflakes that morning.

  “Good morning, Sir!”

  Pasha responded with a grunt and pointed his finger at his chin, which was his way of saying that I had something stuck on mine. I had indeed cut myself shaving when he buzzed me, and I had applied a small piece of cigarette paper to stop the bleeding. Embarrassed, I quickly wiped it off.

  Pasha motioned for me to sit across from him, some five feet away. I had never ridden in a stretch limousine before, and the distance between us made me feel awkward. So I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and ventured something about the weather being chilly this morning. The driver stepped on the gas and caused me to nearly slide off my seat.

  Grabbing the handle above the window, I adjusted myself and smiled at Pasha, who just looked at me, perplexed.

  After a few awkward beats, Pasha asked me if “mumble blurt Yohannes blah?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I cringed.

  Pasha shook his head, and repeated his question.

  “Sorry, I . . . I’m much sharper when I’ve had coffee, ha, ha . . . ahem . . .” As my laughter turned into a cough, Pasha asked his mysterious question for the third time.

  Sounded like Albanian.

  Since I couldn’t ask him to repeat himself a fourth time, I simply froze in a silly expression that must have looked something like “Please don’t throw me out of the car.”

  “Rumble bumble facking vacation, can you believe it?” Pasha said finally, allowing me (miraculously) to catch his drift. Yohannes had asked Pasha for a vacation to go visit his family back in Ethiopia. He hadn’t taken leave for more than two years, and so I thought I would point that out, in my boss’s defense. This prompted Pasha to look at me suspiciously. Clearly, he would have preferred if I had agreed with him that my director was a flake. An awkward silence followed, during which I racked my brain for something smart to say.

  “Mumble blurt mumble,” said Pasha, after a few beats.

  “Um . . . I’m sorry, what?”

  “Mumble blurt mumble! ”

  “Oh . . . yeah. . . .”

  I shook my head knowingly and raised an eyebrow to signal empathy with Pasha’s point of view. And so it went all the way to the airport. I agreed with him on a lot of issues and he seemed to like that. I soon developed an arsenal of jujitsu answers, like “Really?” “Interesting,” “Is that so?” “I see,” just to keep the conversation going.

  At university, I had been taught that diplomats like to keep talking until they agree, or agree to keep talking. In this case, Pasha just kept talking and I kept agreeing.

  I managed to survive the trip to the airport, though my neck was starting to hurt from all the nodding. Through some act of divine intervention, I was not seated next to Pasha on the first leg of our flight, which meant I had seven hours to figure out a strategy for surviving the next two weeks with a boss I couldn’t understand. I concluded that my best bet was to initiate conversations so that I would at least know what the topic was. Perhaps he would be easier to understand if we spoke French? Or maybe I should try reading his lips? Or, better, his mind? If only I could catch a few hours of sleep, I would be able to figure it out.

  “Mumble blurt facking Halliday will like it?”

  After six hours of adjusting my pillow, I was finally about to doze off when Pasha woke me with a statement, or a question, or something, which included the word “Halliday” in it. He was also waving a case containing a bottle of cologne, which allowed me to put two and two together.

  “Facking Halliday” referred to Mr. Denis Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, the number-two man in the operation, after Pasha. As for the bottle of cologne, I guessed it was a token gift from Pasha to Halliday. Would Halliday like it?

  “Um . . . sure!” I said. In truth, I felt that a bottle of cologne was a strange gift to give a man stationed in an international crisis zone. But I was pleasantly surprised that Pasha would bring “facking Halliday” a present, for I had heard through the grapevine that Pasha and Denis had been bitter enemies since before I was born. Had the animosity between the two men been exaggerated? I hoped so. In any case, it was good to see that two adults with the kind of responsibilities they had didn’t let personal conflict interfere with their work.

  The problem, as it turned out, was not so much that their personal conflict interfered with their work; it was more that the work interfered with their personal conflict, which would eventually grow into a full-blown showdown that would take on international proportions. But for the time being, Pasha came bearing a gift. I was still years from understanding how Pasha really functioned. I would later learn that the nicer he was to a fellow colleague, the more worried that person should be.

  Changing the subject, Pasha pointed his chin at a young stewardess.

  “Cute, huh?” he said, his eyes suddenly sparkling.

  “Um . . . yeah!” I said, with too much emphasis. “Pretty hot!”

  The stewardess wasn’t all that, but who cared? I understood what Pasha was saying, and we were now bonding.

  “Elle a du chien! ” said Pasha, which in French means she has a doglike quality. This was supposed to be a compliment, I think. I returned his wink and shook my head, communicating a false desire to copulate with the poor unsuspecting stewardess. This was great. Pasha and I would get along now. Two horny bastards on their way to Baghdad.

  “Hamabla itinerary!” said Pasha.

  Got it. The man wants to see his itinerary. I had scheduled appointments for him with every Iraqi minister, every Kurdish rebel leader, and every UN agency head working in Iraq. Pasha looked at it for a bit and suddenly began to laugh.

  “Who’s this Nasredin?” he asked.

  “Erm . . .” I looked at my own copy of the itinerary for a guy called Nasredin. Ideally his title should be there too.

  “I had a friend called Nasredin, you know, when I was young, in Cyprus.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah. We caught him facking a donkey, ha ha ha!”

  “Rrr . . . really?”

  Somebody please tell me there’s a hidden camera somewhere.

  It would take me years to accurately describe how I perceived Pasha at that moment. Then I saw the movie Borat.

  Pasha was laughing to tears as he recounted how his donkey-fucking friend Nasredin had been caught with his pants down, standing on a stool behind the animal. This whole bonding thing was getting a bit out of control. So after pretending to laugh along for a bit, I tried to get Pasha to focus back on his itinerary. But Pasha cast it aside.

  “Rumble mumble report?” he asked, suddenly serious. He had this way of changing moods all the time, which is not something people from my native Scandinavia do unless they’ve had a lot to drink. This would be stop and go, I realized, as I endeavored once again to decrypt Pasha’s thoughts. Let’s see, what could he mean by “rumble mumble report?”

  “Yes, I’ve read it twice, actually,” I said, betting that he was referring to Halliday’s draft report on the humanitarian conditions in Iraq, which I knew Pasha wanted to rewrite completely during our trip. “You mumble the recommendations and give to me,” he said.

  He went back to his seat, and I proceeded to go through the report and highlight important passages with a yellow marker as the plane began its shaky descent to Heathrow Airport.

  As we waited for our connecting flight to Kuwait in the British Airways lounge, Pasha read through the report, from time to time shaking his head with an expression of disagreement or frustration with something, or someone. Occasionally, he would point to a pass
age and mumble something, and I would agree in a tentative sort of way, since I couldn’t see what he was talking about from where I was sitting.

  CNN kept showing the same images over and over. U.S. planes taking off from aircraft carriers. Iraqi citizens chanting defiantly on their way into one of Saddam’s palaces in their excitement to serve as human shields for their beloved leader. Incredibly, CNN had no comment on whether the Iraqis in question really were so eager to stand in harm’s way or whether, as seemed evident to me, they had been forced into that role by Saddam’s henchmen. Here was footage epitomizing the moral blackmail to which the international community was subjected by the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the twenty-four-hour newspeople had no comment.

  The way I read it, Saddam was holding his people hostage. And we were in the role of the hostage negotiators, flying in to make sure his people could be fed while the whole ordeal lasted. But how long would this permanent state of crisis last? Nobody seemed to have an answer, least of all Pasha and I.

  But there we were. The United States was about to bomb Iraq for impeding the work of the UN weapons inspectors. As nonessential UN personnel were being pulled out of Baghdad, we were going in.

  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Iraqi chief diplomat Tariq Aziz were both touring the Arab world in separate attempts to drum up support for their respective positions. Wherever Albright went, her host would call on Iraq to “cooperate with the UN Security Council,” and wherever Aziz went, his host would call for “a peaceful resolution to the crisis.” In essence, a poll was being conducted to see how many countries would support a U.S. strike against Iraq and how many would oppose it. Albright was adamant that, one way or another, Saddam Hussein would be “kept in his box.” It was a great one-liner, but unfortunately, Saddam was not alone in his box. More than twenty-three million people had to live in that box with him, hence the reason for our mission.1

  The strict economic sanctions kept in place since the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been devastating for the population. Originally the sanctions had been imposed in 1990 to force Saddam to withdraw his forces from Kuwait. After the UN-mandated international coalition kicked him out by force, the sanctions were left in place to ensure that the Iraqi dictator complied with the terms of the cease-fire. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the UN weapons inspectors quarantined and blew up a significant chunk of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but lately the Iraqi dictator had begun to impede their work. According to the inspectors’ records of what had been sold to Iraq before the war, there were still some weapons missing, particularly in the biological field. Regular finds kept confirming suspicions that Saddam was lying and evading the inspection teams at every turn, so quite logically, the UN concluded that the Iraqi dictator must still be up to something on the WMD front.

  Meanwhile, it wasn’t Saddam’s WMDs that were killing most Iraqis. The Iraqi dictator was content to kill most of his subjects the old-fashioned way: the lack of food, clean water, and electricity was decimating the poorest layers of Iraq’s population. The Oil-for-Food program was meant to alleviate the humanitarian situation, but it had gotten off to a very slow start. More than a year had gone by since the UN and the government of Iraq had signed on to the Oil-for-Food deal, and the UN was still scrambling to get it up and running.

  The process of pumping oil, signing contracts, and getting UN approval to import food and medicine and spare parts had met with delays at every turn. The need in Iraq was enormous, not just for the food and medicine the program promised to bring but also for electricity, clean water, education materials, vaccination campaigns, farming tools, hospital equipment, transportation—all the things societies need to function at a basic level.

  In response to those needs, Denis Halliday and his UN observers in the field had written a report advocating a massive increase in the size of the Oil-for-Food program. The problem was that we were still in a trial phase. The United States had threatened not to renew the program if there were any signs that the Iraqi government was diverting humanitarian goods to serve the needs of the elite or the military. And at this early stage, the Clinton administration meant business. The program was to be renewed every six months. We had no idea that it would go on for years and grow into the largest humanitarian operation in UN history. Washington’s threat to nix the next phase had credibility, because the Clinton administration was under siege from Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms on Capitol Hill and could not afford to look weak on Iraq.

  In Washington’s view, the job of our observers was to monitor the distribution of goods throughout Iraq, not to advocate for more supplies. Of course, if they wanted that kind of reporting, they should never have put humanitarian workers in charge of it. Most of our people had made a career out of advocating for more aid wherever they went. Never before had they been asked to hold a totalitarian regime accountable for distributing humanitarian goods to its population. In essence, we were struggling to respond to two contradictory demands: on the one hand, the UN was asked to enforce sanctions on Iraq, and on the other, it was asked to alleviate them. It was a twisted mandate, which bore within it a seed of contradiction that allowed Saddam Hussein to use his oil wealth to play nations against one another, further dividing the international community for years until finally he succeeded in shattering the unity of the coalition that had evicted him from Kuwait in 1991.

  But the program had its deliverables: food and medicine going to people in need. My conviction was that in order to ask for more humanitarian imports, we had to provide assurances to the Security Council that we were on top of our observation duties. The whole point of the program was to help Iraq’s civilians without letting a cent of Iraq’s oil money go into Saddam’s pocket. Our UN observers in Iraq were supposed to make sure that the goods were not diverted to serve the needs of the regime. The problem was that our guys were not free to go where they wanted. They were always escorted by Iraqi security personnel, and their ability to cross-check information was extremely limited. The civilians they interviewed seemed to speak from a script drafted by Saddam himself, and that script ended up in our report, unsupported by reliable information. We would read that five thousand children were dying every month, but no solid source or methodology for coming up with that statistic could be cited. My college newspaper had a better fact-checking mechanism than our UN observers in Iraq. When I ventured to say as much to Pasha, he looked up at me with an expression that clarified his vision of my duties. I was there to take orders, not to emit opinions. But to the extent that my remark could be used to undermine his archenemy and second-in-command, Denis Halliday, he made a mental note of it.

  Upon landing in Kuwait, we were escorted into a special lounge for government officials by a fellow from the Kuwaiti protocol. The lounge was equipped with a human coffee dispenser. He stood in a corner of the room with a silver platter, and once in a while he stepped up to serve us another coffee shot. It was no ordinary espresso. It wasn’t even like Turkish coffee, which is pasty and black. It was a yellowish, hyperconcentrated caffeine brew, the smell of which could wake up a hibernating bear a mile away.

  The human coffee dispenser kept serving me shots because I did the wrong hand movement when trying to return my cup. I had noticed the Kuwaiti minister shake his hand before putting his cup back on the tray and figured the move was a gesture of politeness. In fact, it meant “Fill me up again”; I must have drunk a few too many of those coffee shots, because when we got to the airplane I had a pressing urge to visit the men’s room. Of course, the sight of the old UN-EMBLAZONED, Russian-built albatross of a propeller plane that was supposed to take us into Iraq didn’t help. But we had left the lounge and were now in a remote part of the airport under military control, with no bathrooms in sight.

  We were greeted by a red-faced Ukrainian fellow who reeked of vodka. Apparently, he was the pilot. He handed us a pair of large bright-orange ear mufflers, similar to those worn by airport workers in the 1970s, and showed us in through the c
argo door at the back of the plane.

  If the exterior appearance of the aircraft was disconcerting, its interior was downright frightening. Who in their right mind would fly into Iraq in the middle of a crisis in a Khrushchev-era propeller machine equipped with half-bolted cardboard seats and defective, toylike seat belts? The question hovered in my mind as I tried to settle in.

  I looked at Pasha. He seemed just as uneasy.

  “Mumble facking should have gone by road,” he said.

  Yeah, no kidding! Soon, the plane’s rotors started spinning, prompting us to put on our ear mufflers. After a minute Pasha poked me on the shoulder and began to talk.

  Had the plane’s engines not been so loud, and had we not been wearing ear mufflers, I might conceivably have stood a chance of deciphering part of his mumble, inasmuch as I was beginning to develop the ability to read his lips. But even so, he wouldn’t have been able to hear my answer even if I’d screamed it at the top of my lungs. So I calmly began moving my lips in reply, at which point it finally occurred to him that it was impossible for us to talk. He sat back, and I resumed trying to buckle my seat belt.

  Then Pasha poked me on the shoulder again. This time, he had a smile on his face. He pointed toward the cockpit and began to imitate the drunken pilot at the controls. Pasha, it turned out, was a fantastic mimic, and we both needed a good laugh to calm our nerves.

  We were the only passengers on the plane. Behind us, covered by a net, was a large shipment of spaghetti and canned tomatoes. This was somewhat reassuring. If we survived the crash that now appeared inevitable to me, we’d have enough food to sustain ourselves in the desert for weeks. I tried for a second time to buckle my seat belt, but nothing clicked, so I tied the strips together and took a deep breath. I would have killed for a Xanax.