Backstabbing for Beginners Page 6

  Suffice it to say that the situation was tense when Halliday came by the hotel to pick us up. My first faux pas in Baghdad helped clear the air. Protocol usually demands that the most important person sit in the rear right seat of the car. Unaware of that, I left Pasha and Halliday to chat, entered the air-conditioned vehicle, and sat in what I generally consider to be my favorite seat. Suddenly, I noticed both of them bending down to look at me with incredulous smiles on their faces. I smiled back, unsure what they were smiling about, and then Pasha pointed his finger at the shotgun seat, my rightful place.

  The car took off with both of them sitting in the back (Pasha in the rear right). Pasha and Halliday dabbled in generalities and exchanged vague complaints about the “system.” At the UN, complaining about the system was like complaining about the weather—a frequent subject of conversation for people who don’t really feel like talking to one another. Since taking up my duties at the UN, I had heard so many employees complain about the system that I first assumed we were on the verge of some kind of staff rebellion.

  At first, I was shocked by the criticism I heard from UN staff. I thought it reflected a lack of loyalty to the organization. But then I saw people at higher levels of management doing the same. Even Kofi Annan, in his speeches to the staff, rarely failed to mention that he was “aware of all the frustration” involved in working for the organization. So I figured that being critical of the system was like a skill you needed to acquire in order to be part of any discussion.

  Picking up on Pasha and Halliday’s conversation, I decided to share my recent insights with them on the organization’s managerial problems.

  “The thing about the UN,” I ventured, “is that it can’t seem to staff itself properly and it’s desperately inept at buying the things it needs. If you can’t hire and you can’t buy, how are you supposed to manage?”

  Silence in the car.

  Unknown to me, Halliday had previously served as the head of human resources. And Pasha had extensive experience in UN procurement. Mr. Hiring and Mr. Buying shifted in their seats.

  “Cute kid, huh?” Pasha said, finally. I looked back and saw Halliday rolling his eyes in agreement.

  The UN compound in Iraq was known as the Canal Hotel. It had been occupied by the UN since 1991, when the weapons inspections began. I had seen the entrance to it on TV, because that is where the media filmed the weapons inspectors before they went out to “hunt” for WMDs. Back then, they were actually finding stuff. They destroyed tons of chemical and biological weapons—more than had been hit during the Gulf War. It felt strange being there, in their midst. It was like being inside the TV.

  It was easy to tell the weapons inspectors apart from the humanitarian workers. The inspectors were mostly former military people from the United States, Britain, France, and Russia. The humanitarians were mostly from the developing world, especially the Arab world and Africa. In the cafeteria, where we made a quick stop for lunch, the humanitarians and the inspectors sat separately. I realized this when I tried to sit down at one end of the cafeteria and was called by Halliday to come sit at the other end.

  “That’s the inspectors sitting over there,” Halliday whispered, as one of them walked by us with a T-shirt that read, “Bunny Huggers kiss my ass!”

  I didn’t understand the meaning of the message until Halliday explained to us that the humanitarian observers called the weapons inspectors Cowboys and that the weapons inspectors called the humanitarian observers Bunny Huggers. Right there, in the UN cafeteria in Baghdad, we had the physical representation of the division that plagued the international community—and the contradiction that was at the heart of the UN’s own mandate. The sanctions enforcers and the sanctions alleviators couldn’t stand to sit down at a table with one another. Like the jocks and the nerds in a high school cafeteria, they eyed one another suspiciously. I spotted another T-shirt, this one worn by a Bunny Hugger. It read, “UN-SCUM,” a play on the acronym UNSCOM (the United Nations Special Commission), meaning the UN weapons inspectors.

  Pasha and Halliday agreed that it was all pretty childish. But then, when we got up, Pasha said to me, “Take your walkie-talkie off your belt. You look like a facking Cowboy!” We had been issued walkie-talkies because of raised security concerns. The UN used code names for its high-level officials. Halliday was Eagle One. I wonder how long it took the Iraqis listening in to figure that one out. Halliday had a huge freaking pet eagle in his backyard, for which he had asked us to bring along special gourmet seeds.

  As we were finishing up lunch, I was surprised when a guy came up and spoke to me in Danish. He skipped the niceties and asked to speak with me in private. He looked deeply worried, so I agreed. I excused myself from the table and went to meet him in the TV lounge, next door.

  Torben had been a member of our UN guards in Iraqi Kurdistan—a region outside Saddam’s control. There, he had accidentally run over and killed a child some two months earlier. The UN had paid compensation to the family in a Kurdish court, and the legal proceedings looked to be over as far as the local Kurdish authorities were concerned, when the Iraqi government asked that the UN guard be brought down to Baghdad to face Saddam Hussein’s tribunal. Halliday, instead of letting Torben leave the country through Turkey, had ordered him down to Baghdad in compliance with the Iraqi order. Now the guy sat there, unable to leave the country and facing the prospect of prison time at Abu Ghraib. He was freaking out, and he wanted my boss to plead for him with the Iraqi authorities.

  “I want to go back to Denmark,” he said. “My family would go crazy if I had to spend time in an Iraqi prison. And so would I.”

  I shook his hand firmly and promised I’d do everything I could to ensure a safe exit for him. Why had Halliday caved to the Iraqi regime on this? If the Kurds were comfortable with the settlement, why subject one of our own to possible prison time in Baghdad?

  When I went back to the table, Halliday asked me what my compatriot had wanted to talk to me about.

  “He wants to get out of the country,” I said. “As would I.”

  “You know, he’s a bit unstable,” said Halliday.

  “Unstable how? Is his story not true?”

  His story was true, but apparently he kept talking about seeing his comrades getting killed when he served in Bosnia. All the more reason to get him out, I thought. In any case, I’d add his case to Pasha’s talking points and make sure to remind him before his meeting with the foreign minister.

  But first, we had a mutiny to quell. Before walking into the meeting with the UN agency heads, Pasha did his boxing move again and winked at me. Only problem was, there were eight of them and one of him.

  The United Nations had eight agencies working to implement the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. UNICEF dealt with children, FAO with agriculture, WFP with food distribution, WHO with health, UNESCO with education, UNCHS (Habitat) with construction, UNOPS with demining, and UNDP with electricity. They all wanted a piece of the Oil-for-Food cake, and as a consequence the entire UN system was represented in that conference room in Baghdad.

  The UN agency heads were a fiercely independent bunch. Technically they were supposed to be part of the UN, but in reality they considered themselves to be as sovereign as nation-states.

  Meetings at the United Nations rarely begin on time. The rule of thumb is that the first ten minutes are reserved for coffee and small talk. In this case, there was coffee but not much talk. There was too much tension in the air. The interagency meeting was about to start when the representative from the World Food Program, an African fellow named Holbrooke Arthur, threw out his arm at lightning speed and caught an Iraqi fly with his fist.

  “Nice catch,” I said, truly impressed.

  “What?” It was Pasha, sitting to my left. He had just cleared his throat and was about to start talking when I made my comment. Everybody had fallen silent.

  “No, I just. . . . Arthur here caught a fly and, well, he was pretty quick.”

  “Shadap!�
� said Pasha, causing the room to smile.

  “And my first name is Holbrooke, not Arthur,” said Holbrooke Arthur.

  Pasha proceeded to open the meeting. The niceties lasted about twenty minutes. Then the brawl began. One after the other, the agency heads lashed out at U.S. and British policies toward Iraq. Their position had the advantage of being clear: sanctions amounted to genocide and needed to be lifted immediately. With few exceptions, the agency heads categorically refused to change a word in the text of the report they had sent to UN headquarters. On grammar grounds alone it needed a complete rewrite.

  The agency heads, for the most part, were not interested in the politics of peace and security. They were trained in issues relating to economic development. They usually considered their counterparts in the host countries’ ministries to be their bosses and functioned more or less according to the government’s wishes. But this was not Bangladesh. This was Iraq. And part of our mission was to observe and report on the government’s equitable distribution of the goods it bought under the program. Were medicines going only to friends of the regime, or did everybody have access to them? Did certain ethnic groups get cheated out of the food ration? If the program was to be renewed by the UN Security Council, not to mention improved, that type of information needed to be included in our reports. To that effect, the UN had established an “observation mechanism,” which at that stage was barely up and running. If the secretary general had presented that draft of the report to the Security Council, the United States and Britain would have lost all confidence in the UN’s ability to oversee the Oil-for-Food program, and the pipeline of goods flowing into Iraq would likely have been held up for at least several months. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had warned, the “continuation” of the humanitarian program was “not automatic.”

  The agency heads either did not understand or did not care about that equation. They wanted sanctions lifted. Feeding on one another’s rhetoric, they grew more arrogant with every speaker. As far as they were concerned, it was their way or the highway. Pasha was cornered. Halliday, who was supposed to be working for him, had in fact set up a trap on the first day of his visit.

  Incredibly, Pasha stood his ground. When all of them were done, he began speaking. His voice was calm, and his elocution was much clearer than usual. Not BBC-clear, but still I was able to take notes, and some of the agency heads looked like they caught some glimpses of what he was saying as well, though the strain was clear from the creases in their eyes. Somewhat theatrically, Pasha whipped out a text that had been written at UN headquarters and reflected more closely the tone, style, and content of what was expected in a secretary general’s report to the Security Council. The agency heads twitched, fidgeted in their seats, or scratched various parts of their bodies, but they remained silent. The Pasha was speaking, and they didn’t yet know if they could get away with interrupting him. His proposal was simple: to use the headquarters draft as a boilerplate and incorporate into it those agency inputs that were factual as opposed to opinionated. Any recommendations would be up to the secretary general to decide on, based on the facts.

  When Pasha was done, Halliday ventured a loaded question: who had actually written the headquarters draft? Pasha turned to me. He had only recently been appointed to head the program, and the name of the drafter escaped him. I knew who had drafted it. It was Trevor, the man who had warned me on the eve of my trip that I was being observed by Iraqi operatives. I understood that Trevor was disliked by some of our humanitarian colleagues, because of his affiliation with the British Defense Ministry, but I did not expect the room to explode at the mention of his name.

  Some people threw their hands in the air; others cursed. The agency heads were literally “up in arms,” and it was quite a sight. Halliday stood up, knocking over his chair. His job was to keep the agencies in line, but instead he led the mutiny. In a fit of rage, he accused Trevor of being a spook, working “for the MI5 or the MI6 or whatever!” (He wasn’t sure which actual service, foreign or domestic, the accused spy was working for.)

  Spooky, as Pasha nicknamed Trevor thereafter, had his views about the Iraqi regime. While they were not those of Halliday or the agency heads, he did, in my opinion, care deeply about helping the Iraqi people. To my knowledge, nothing he ever did was inconsistent with Security Council resolutions. And his work proved very useful in shaping proposals for improving the program in a way that made them acceptable to the United States and Britain, both veto-wielding members of the Security Council.

  Part of the reason the agency heads hated Spooky so much was that he was constantly sending faxes asking them to verify this or clarify that with their Iraqi counterparts, in an effort to bring consistency to the UN’s observation effort. Agency heads didn’t like receiving those faxes. They were reluctant to go to the Iraqi ministries to ask intrusive questions because if the Iraqis refused to answer (which they did nine times out of ten), the agency heads would be forced to report that the government was “not cooperating.” This they would not do, in part because they felt that any report charging poor cooperation by the Iraqi regime would play into the much-hated policies of the United States and Britain, and in part because they feared retribution from the Iraqis themselves. If the government kicked them out of the country, chances were they would need to look for another job. Some of these agency heads had it good in Baghdad, living in large villas with pools and helpers, and racking up huge savings from mission premiums. None of them were eager to get transferred to Khartoum. So most often they simply ignored Spooky’s requests and rationalized their behavior by labeling him a spy.

  Nonetheless, the accusation was serious, and I couldn’t believe it had been made openly in this forum. The row lasted a few minutes, with agency heads interrupting one another to lash out at the absent Spooky and at UN headquarters in general. They sounded exactly like Iraqi government officials. Veins were protruding from their throats, and fingers were being wagged. Lifetimes of frustration from working in the UN system were being voiced, and for a moment it looked like the entire Oil-for-Food program was about to implode.

  Then it happened. Pasha slammed his fist on the table, picked up his things, and stood up. Shouting, he informed the mutineers that he was going back to New York immediately, cutting short his two-week mission, and that he would report directly to Kofi Annan about their behavior. As for the report to the Security Council, he would write it himself; and if agencies refused to cooperate, then he would hold them to account. He reminded everybody in the room that their salaries were paid out of the Oil-for-Food program and that failure to live up to their responsibilities under Chapter VII of the UN Charter carried serious consequences.

  Of course, with all the excitement, Pasha had reverted to “mumble-blurt” mode, and many of the agency heads who weren’t used to his accent probably understood only a few words, like “don’t give a fack . . . going back . . . write report alone . . . your salaries . . . facking consequences.” But the meaning was clear to all. They had overstepped their authority and Pasha was bringing down the hammer.

  The agencies cowered. Not since middle school had I seen anybody assert authority so effectively. After a long, painful silence, Halliday sighed and proposed that the meeting be reconvened in an hour, to give everybody a chance to calm their nerves and read the headquarters draft—or something to that effect. Before he finished his sentence, Pasha got up and made for the door. I followed in his trail, trying, as best I could, to keep a poker face. There was no plane out of Iraq that day or the next. So I figured Pasha was bluffing when he threatened to go straight back to New York. At least that’s how I managed to keep the image of Pasha and me on camelback out of my head.

  We walked upstairs, and Pasha installed himself in Halliday’s office. He pointed to the large no-smoking sign on the wall, winked at me, and lit up a cigar. Halliday was the man who had led the campaign to impose a smoking ban throughout all UN buildings in the world. Our UN compound in Baghdad was plastere
d with absurdly large no-smoking signs everywhere. Halliday hated smoking with a vengeance, and his crusade to ban smoking at the UN was one of his pet projects. His own assistants were not allowed to smoke, even out of his presence. So when Halliday finally entered his office and saw Pasha sitting with his feet up on his desk, blowing thick Cohiba puffs at the ceiling fan while talking on the telephone, I seriously thought he was going to lose it.

  Impressively, Halliday managed to remain somewhat composed. But his face was very red, and his lips were trembling with anger as he stuttered: “Dih-did . . . didn’t you see the no-smoking signs?” Pasha ignored him and continued to speak on the phone.

  “Excuse me,” Halliday insisted.

  Pasha raised a finger putting Halliday on hold.

  Effectively “on hold,” Halliday turned to me, exasperated. I didn’t know what to tell him, so I just shrugged, trying to look understanding and hoping he hadn’t seen the cigarette I was hiding behind my back. Halliday exhaled, shook his head, and informed me that the agency heads were ready to reconvene if Pasha was still interested.

  Pasha let them wait a bit, but eventually we went back. When the meeting reconvened, everything was back to normal. In a reverent tone, the agency heads took turns issuing apologies. The report would be written according to Pasha’s wishes. In exchange, Pasha agreed to recommend a review of the program to identify the unmet humanitarian needs of the Iraqi population. That review would eventually force the Security Council to more than double the amount of oil Iraq would be allowed to sell through the Oil-for-Food program (boosting its annual revenue from $4 billion to more than $10 billion).

  This approach made sense from a humanitarian point of view, but it would also strengthen Saddam’s ability to enrich himself and bribe his allies around the world. It would push the UN into an expanded business relationship with his regime—one that would come under intense investigation years later by the new Iraqi government as well as by the CIA, the FBI, the New York District Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Congress, the UN itself, and the judicial authorities of just about every country involved in buying oil and selling humanitarian goods to Iraq under the UN’s flag. Billions of dollars would go missing. Thousands of criminal acts would be committed. And the revelations that would emerge from the dozens of international investigations into the UN’s “deal with the devil” would force unprecedented changes on the world organization.