Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  The plane took off over Kuwait City, and within minutes we were flying at a low altitude over the no-man’s-land that separates Kuwait from Iraq. The city I had woken up in was experiencing something akin to a modern-day gold rush: a bubble of prosperity and unbridled optimism, fueled by the colonization of cyberspace. The country I was flying into had been left to rot for more than six years under a combination of repression and deprivation. As we flew over the no-man’s-land, I saw that the sand was littered with craters of all sizes, courtesy of Operation Desert Storm.

  The sun was scorching, but the inside of the plane was beginning to cool off as we gained altitude. I kept looking out the window, taking refuge in the purity of the desolate sight down below. Not a man or an animal. Not a house, not a tree. Just sand craters, as far as the eye could see. It was unreal—like flying over the surface of the moon on a sunny day.

  Looking at the vast landscape made me feel insignificant, which in turn helped me relax a bit. What good did it serve to worry? I had zero control. It suddenly dawned on me why people in the region kept saying “inshallah” (God willing) at the end of almost every sentence. It had irritated me at first. Sentences like “We hope to send over the memo shortly, inshallah” struck me as useless invocations of the will of the Almighty. Now, I was just hoping to land in Iraq safely, inshallah.

  I checked my UN Laissez Passer—a light-blue diplomatic passport that affords UN employees immunity while on mission. Would it protect me if suddenly hostilities broke out between the United States and Iraq? I sure hoped so. But I couldn’t bank on it. The image of UN peacekeepers chained to allied bombing targets in the former Yugoslavia came to mind. Surely Saddam Hussein had no more respect for the UN than Slobodan Milosevic did. He had kept international workers as hostages for months before the Gulf War. He eventually released them, right before hostilities started, but given the pounding he took thereafter, I thought he would act differently next time. And news reports had increasingly indicated that “next time” might be this time.

  Back at the airport lounge, I had asked Pasha if this was really the best moment for us to visit Iraq. He didn’t look so sure himself, but he thought it would send “the wrong signal” if he backed out of his trip. It would mean that the UN was anticipating the outbreak of violence.

  But wasn’t it legitimate for the UN to read the writing on the wall and protect its personnel? Would our acting as if violence wasn’t about to break out stop it from breaking out? The Iraqis had insisted that Pasha stick to his schedule, because they calculated that a high-level visit by a UN official might complicate Washington’s plans. I personally saw little reason why we should play into their hands. But other considerations had come into play as well. Kofi Annan felt that the humanitarian program should not be held hostage to the politics of the conflict. His instinct was noble, it seemed to me, but was it realistic?

  Hell, what did I know? Kofi Annan and Pasha had been through major crises before. Afghanistan. Bosnia. Somalia. Surely, they knew what they were doing. In fact, Pasha, in addition to being the head of the Oil-for-Food program, was also the UN’s security coordinator, the highest-level official in charge of staff security within the organization. I wasn’t sure how he could be expected to handle both of these functions at the same time, since they were both full-time jobs, but if I added up everything that I didn’t understand at that stage, I’d have had a nervous breakdown before touchdown and would have needed a medevac out of Iraq on day one. Perhaps this was not the best way to jump-start my UN career.

  I had to pull it together. I had strived to get myself into just this type of situation ever since I graduated from college, and it hadn’t come easy. This wasn’t the time to freak out. International politics had been part of my life since I was a kid. Sitting on my father’s shoulders, at age six, I attended protests in front of the Soviet Embassy, demanding the release of political refugees. My parents were international journalists and, because they couldn’t afford a nanny, they often took my brother or me along to work. Sometimes, it meant we got to shake hands with heads of state. Other times, it meant we were gassed by police as they broke up street protests my parents were covering.

  I was born in Denmark, grew up mostly in Paris, and immigrated to the United States at eighteen. After graduating from Brown University, I hitched a ride to New York. Most of my friends went for banking jobs in the city. I just went to the city and banked that I would find a job.

  After being called “human spam” by a busy pedestrian as I was trying to collect donations for an environmental NGO one day, I went about looking for a real job. That same day I decided to find a way to break into the United Nations. After roaming around the UN building for a whole day, during which I took the tourist tour twice, I managed to find out about a job opening—for the position of messenger. I was actually pretty excited about the prospect of being a messenger at the UN. The “help wanted” pages of the New York Times had been most uninspiring. It seemed most firms wanted accountants or receptionists, and I had not exactly been a hit at the interviews I had managed to line up. At the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, I had shown up wearing a suit. Everybody else was in shorts and Birkenstocks. A temp agency gave me a typing test, which I failed miserably, leading them to conclude that I would not make a good secretary. I had interviewed for a paralegal position at a law firm, but I believe I hurt my chances when they asked me if I was “detail oriented” and I casually admitted that I “wasn’t exactly the anal type.”

  So I went to the interview for the position of UN messenger, assuming that if only I could get my foot in the door I would soon be able to move up the ladder. Unfortunately, the United Nations is not a place where people start in the mailroom and end up in management. Myriad rules are there to prevent support staff from moving to higher levels of professional responsibility. We’re not talking about a glass ceiling here. More like reinforced concrete with armored plates. Thankfully, the recruiter turned me down.

  “You’re overqualified,” she said. “You should be a professional, not general-service staff.” At the UN, they have an apartheid-like system to separate people in support functions from those in policy functions. The latter are called the “professionals,” even though they are no more professional than the former.

  “So do you have any openings for professional staff?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, “but you need a master’s degree to apply.”

  I walked out of the UN thoroughly depressed. How could I be both overqualified and underqualified to work there? I cursed at myself for not having secured some kind of banking job during my last semester in college. At the same time, I knew that I wouldn’t necessarily excel in that environment. But what kind of environment would I be a fit for if I couldn’t even land a messenger gig?

  “Journalism!” I said to myself, out loud, on Forty-Second Street, like someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  When I got home to the dingy little apartment I shared near Times Square with a good friend from college (and, occasionally, a big fat rat), I opened the Yellow Pages and called Le Monde, the French daily that I had grown up reading when I lived in Paris. I figured it would have a correspondent in New York, and that since I spoke French and was right here and wanted to be a journalist, I could perhaps be of service.

  Incredibly, my assumption proved correct. Afsane, the charming Persian woman who served as UN correspondent for Le Monde, was going on vacation, and she needed an intern to be in the office in her absence.

  Afsane saved my professional life. And she gave me my first glimpse of the inner workings of the United Nations. From one day to the next I was wandering around, wide-eyed, on the second and third floors of the UN Secretariat, which hosts the Security Council and the UN correspondents’ offices. In addition to working for Le Monde, Afsane was a weekly guest on the CNN talk show Diplomatic License, anchored by the channel’s UN correspondent, Richard Roth. At the start of the UN General Assembly, in September, CNN
needed a production assistant to help Richard cover the event, and by that time I was hungry enough to walk up to his producer and make a pitch for myself. It worked, and soon I was hired by CNN and ordered to chase after ministers and UN ambassadors with a camera crew angling to ambush them with sound-bite-provoking questions.

  The General Assembly is to the United Nations what Oscar is to Hollywood—except the climax comes at the beginning, not at the end. The only day the General Assembly hall is full is when the U.S. president makes his address, opening two weeks of speeches by heads of state from around the world. The Russians and the Chinese used to speak to a full house during the cold war, but since then they have had to contend with a lot of empty seats.

  The American president’s arrival at the General Assembly has an imperial quality to it. Every year, the entire UN building is cordoned off with cement trucks. Helicopters hover in the air, sharpshooters are positioned on every rooftop, and a warship stands watch on the East River. The president rolls in like a Roman emperor. His twenty-car motorcade is preceded by dozens of state troopers on Harley Davidson motorcycles, who rumble into the UN compound ahead of him like a Praetorian Guard. When the president walks up to the General Assembly, jaws drop and eyebrows rise all around. A strange giddiness follows his passage. Murmurs of “Did you see?” trail in his footsteps. Then the president speaks and everybody claps, even though many of those in attendance represent governments that revile all that the American president has just said.

  The General Assembly is a largely ceremonial forum. It is open to all members of the United Nations and operated on the basis of “one nation, one vote.” Its greatest achievement is to approve its own budget. The other resolutions it passes are “nonbinding,” which means that they have the same weight as a poll—an opinion survey of what governments think at a given time.

  The action, insofar as war and peace are concerned, takes place in the Security Council—a sort of VIP lounge where governments get down to business. The Security Council is composed of five veto-wielding permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, the Russian Federation, and China) and ten rotating members. Assuming no veto is used, it takes nine out of fifteen votes for a resolution to pass.

  At the entrance to the Security Council chamber hangs a large woven replica of Picasso’s famous Guernica painting, a cubist depiction of the Fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica on April 26, 1937. The picture hangs there as a reminder to all of the horrors of war. To political doves, the lesson of Picasso’s Guernica is that war should be avoided at all costs. To political hawks, the lesson is that Fascist dictators must be confronted before they can do more harm. The same picture conjures up completely opposite lessons, depending on one’s intellectual predisposition. But beyond the moral grandstanding, members also have concrete interests at play in Security Council deliberations. This explains why hawks and doves sometimes switch roles, depending on what issue is under discussion.

  Covering international news was fascinating to me. But when the action at the UN died down, I was sent on local news shoots, for which I displayed little talent. Covering the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, was not exactly my kind of gig. Neither was trespassing on the lawn of a mother who had just lost her son to ask her to share her feelings with the rest of the world. As soon as I stepped out of the international news realm, I felt rather inadequate. Besides, I had developed a jealousy of the people I saw walking in and out of the Security Council chambers. Some meetings there are public, but the most interesting ones—where the real negotiations take place—are closed to the media. I wanted to be on the other side of the fence—making a difference!

  It took me almost three years to get an interview at the UN. The queries I sent after getting my master’s degree seemed to vanish into a bureaucratic black hole, and when I called to follow up, it was like trying to get through to a customer service representative at the phone company. In the end, I took the job at Preston Gates with Jack Abramoff, learning how to manipulate the democratic process in favor of the special-interest groups.

  The call that shook me out of my cubicle job and landed me my first interview at the UN had electrified me. I hadn’t quite expected to find myself on a plane heading for Baghdad so soon. But I had gotten what I wished for: a chance to make a difference in the lives of millions of destitute civilians.

  The further north we got, the more the landscape began to look like the idea I had of Mesopotamia (“the land between the rivers,” the ancient name for Iraq). Patches of green would appear sporadically along the banks of the Tigris River, and the density of towns and villages grew steadily, indicating we were approaching the Iraqi capital. The ride on the flying carcass of UN Airlines had turned out to be surprisingly smooth. Unfortunately, this was not a sign of things to come.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cowboys and Bunny Huggers

  HABANIA AIRPORT, IRAQ, NOVEMBER 13, 1997

  We landed at the Iraqi military airport of Habaniya, an hour outside Baghdad. MIG-29 airplanes were stationed along the runway, engines running, ready for takeoff, in anticipation of an imminent U.S.-led airstrike. Some of them were covered in green nets, in what seemed an absurd attempt at camouflage, given the observation powers of U.S. satellites.

  As we waited for the cargo door to lower, Pasha turned to me and made a boxing motion. I was unsure whom exactly Pasha was planning to punch upon arrival in Baghdad, but before the day was over, I would understand the meaning of his gesture. Right then, I just nodded, giving him carte blanche to punch anybody he felt like as long as it wasn’t me.

  A few minutes later, we were met by Denis Halliday—a.k.a. “Facking Halliday”—the UN’s number-one man in Iraq. He greeted us with a certain Irish cool—a demeanor I had not expected of the character my colleagues at headquarters had described as a political hothead. He introduced me to his assistant, a finely dressed young Lebanese fellow whom everybody seemed to call Habibi, an Arabic term of endearment. Habibi was about my age and had an equally confused smile on his face. Some friendships take a long time to establish. Under the circumstances, this one took about the time of a handshake.

  Several other UN staffers were huddling around us, and in the commotion I suddenly couldn’t find my bag containing all of Pasha’s briefing notes. Habibi told me that one of the drivers had probably put it in the trunk of one of the cars, and since the motorcade was about to leave, I would probably wait till we arrived at the hotel to retrieve it. It didn’t immediately occur to me that our UN drivers were part of the Iraqi intelligence machine, and so I placed my hope in Habibi’s theory and stepped into one of the white air-conditioned SUVs that formed our motorcade.

  As I did, my eyes briefly met those of an Iraqi guard. He stood there in military fatigues, clutching an AK-47 rifle and staring directly at me with eyes that seemed glossy with hate. Perhaps he had singled me out because, of all the people there, I looked most like a Yankee. Or maybe he was simply jealous, seeing me step into an air-conditioned vehicle while he had to stand there in the scorching heat waiting for a Tomahawk cruise missile to fall from the sky. I would never find out. But the hostile look in his eyes stayed with me.

  The drive to Baghdad took us through several military roadblocks. The country, it appeared, lived in a state of permanent self-occupation. We eventually arrived at the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where a horde of photographers awaited. They were strategically positioned at the entrance of the hotel, so as to catch a snapshot of my boss stepping onto the famous mosaic featuring George H.W. Bush looking like a bloodthirsty vampire. Under his face, the Iraqi artist had added the words “Bush is criminal” in big letters. The flashes were blinding, and the pictures published in the papers the next day had us stepping over Bush’s face with what looked like a smile.

  The Al-Rasheed Hotel, made famous by CNN’s reporting during the Gulf War, is a claustrophobic construction designed with the intent of spying on its occupants. Rumor had it that while Peter Arnett was reporting f
rom the rooftops during Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein was hiding somewhere in its basement, knowing America would not bomb its own journalists, no matter how irreverent they were. A Finnish architect who had been involved in the hotel’s construction later told me that there were cameras behind some of the mirrors. And apparently the many sprinklers on the ceiling had little to do with Iraq’s fire-code regulations. Saddam’s ears were everywhere.

  Thankfully, Habibi had managed to get my bag back from one of the drivers. It looked like someone had thrown a party inside, but none of my things had been removed. I checked out our itinerary for the day. We had an important meeting with all the heads of the UN agencies working for our humanitarian operation in Iraq. The UN agencies, all of which had to work with Saddam’s regime on a daily basis, had essentially gone “native.” They were, for the most part, in full agreement with their counterparts in the Iraqi ministries: they felt the sanctions on Iraq should be lifted immediately. Knowing such a move was not in the cards, we considered it our job to remind them that their bosses sat in New York, not in Baghdad. It promised to be a fight.

  In a few days, Kofi Annan was scheduled to submit his report to the Security Council about the humanitarian conditions in Iraq and the impact of the Oil-for-Food program. The Iraqis were calling our operation the “Oil-for-Nothing” program, and the Americans were calling it the “Oil-for-Palaces” program. The UN was as polarized as the larger international community, and it would be a challenge to come up with an internal consensus on what the objective reality of the program really was.

  Some of the assertions in the report sounded just like the propaganda of the Iraqi regime and contained very few verifiable facts. Scattered reports of malnutrition and rampant disease had been lumped together by Halliday’s office into a draft report that recommended a massive overhaul of the Oil-for-Food program. There was no question that the situation in Iraq was dire, but in order to persuade the most skeptical members of the Security Council of the need to improve the program, we needed hard facts. The field mission had already warned that it would not stand for any changes, and yet they would have to be made.