DELTA SHUTTLE, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK CITY TO WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 28, 2004
I never imagined it would come to this. Yet here I was, sitting on a plane headed for Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to testify before Congress in less than two hours. I would be speaking about a rather strange affair. Margaret Warner, of the PBS NewsHour, described it as the “largest financial scandal in UN history.” Fred Barnes, of Fox News, went further, calling it the worst scandal in the history of mankind.
I fiddled with the ventilation knob. My armpits were drenched. I sat back, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. How the hell had I landed myself in this mess?
“Should be a nice day, huh?”
I opened my eyes and looked at my neighbor. I knew from the instant he sat down that he was a compulsive airplane conversationalist, and I had tried my best to avoid his eager gaze.
“Not a cloud in the sky,” he added, pointing out the window and encouraging me to check for myself.
“That’s right,” I said. “Should be a smooth flight.”
I reached inside my bag, withdrawing my iPod and the speech I was supposed to give in a couple of hours. I needed to go over my remarks one last time.
“So!” he said. “What brings you to D.C.?”
Did he not see I had plugged in my earphones?
“I have to… give this speech,” I said.
“At the House International Relations Committee.”
“Huh.… Are you like an expert or something?”
“No, not exactly. I used to work for the UN. I just need to focus on this for a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course, of course.…”
I could feel his gaze over my shoulder as I tried to concentrate on my text. I took a deep breath and exhaled irritably.
“You feeling nervous?” he asked. He had a knowing grin on his chubby face.
“Yeah, a bit. But I’d feel much better if I could—”
“Have you seen the studies they did?”
“Who? What studies?”
“You know, about people’s fears? Apparently, public speaking ranks number one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You know what number two is?”
“No.”
“Death! Ha ha ha ha!”
With that, he slipped out a copy of the New York Post and started flipping the pages noisily. I turned up the volume on my iPod and forced myself to concentrate. I was on the second page of my testimony when he poked me on the shoulder.
“What?”
“Is that you?” he asked, pointing at an article in his tabloid. It had a big fat title:
U.N. BIG WILL TELL ALL ON OILY SCAM
“Oh,” I said. “No, that wouldn’t be me. Nobody would call me a ‘UN big’…do you mind if I have a look, though?”
To my knowledge, no senior UN official had agreed to testify yet, so I was curious to know whom the article was talking about. As I read the story, by Niles Lathem, I had a shock:
WASHINGTON—Michael Soussan, a former program coordinator for the $100 billion fund, is expected to be the star witness of a House International Relations Committee hearing looking into Saddam’s gigantic $10.1 billion rip-off.
Committee sources said Soussan, now a New York–area writer, is expected to give the first, under oath, public account from an insider about how top U.N. officials were aware of Saddam’s oil smuggling and kickback schemes.…
I put the paper down and stared blankly into space.
“Do you know this guy?” asked my neighbor.
“Um… yeah.”
“Sounds like he’s ready to spill the beans.”
“Yeah.… Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”
As soon as I got up, a stewardess came running.
“Sir, please return to your seat. The pilot has put the seat belt sign on.”
“But I really need to go, I—”
“I’m sorry, sir, please return to your seat.”
“Come on, lady, let him go,” my neighbor intervened. “He’s testifying in Congress today. He’s nervous.”
I wanted to strangle him.
“I’m fine… it’s fine!” I sat back down, turned up the music full blast, and looked out the window.
It had been seven years since I left Washington, D.C., to embark on this unusual journey. The UN Oil-for-Food operation had been set up in 1996 to provide for the humanitarian needs of Iraq’s civilians who had suffered dramatic shortages of basic necessities under the stringent economic sanctions adopted in 1990, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
While diplomats jousted for the moral high ground in New York, lecturing one another on international law, those same laws were being violated methodically behind the scenes through an ever-increasing flow of crooked deals that cheated Iraq’s civilians out of an enormous share of their country’s wealth. Billions had gone missing from right under our nose, and we weren’t even sure how many. Soon, this collective fiasco would be investigated by a high-level anticorruption commission. France, the United States, and Russia would get embroiled in a mutual blame game. Bureaucrats at the United Nations would turn on one another. Hundreds of lobbyists would be called up to defend some 2,300 companies that had broken the law in order to gain favor with Saddam Hussein. The trickle of damning revelations would soon turn into a flood. A judge investigating the fraud in Iraq was killed in an explosion, and several sources used by investigators on the ground mysteriously disappeared. Some influential diplomats, politicians, and other power brokers would go to jail. It promised to be a political bloodbath.
Some people blamed me for helping set this whole debacle in motion after I became the first former employee of the UN operation to call for an independent investigation in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal the previous month. My intervention had snowballed, and I received myriad requests for interviews, including from CNN, Fox, ABC, the BBC, and many others—most of which I turned down. But when I received the invitation from Congress, I decided to accept.
My position, at the crossroads of pressing humanitarian concerns, big-power politics, and multibillion-dollar business interests, provided an unusual vantage point on the Iraq conflict. While much of the international community was hypnotized by the “hunt” for Saddam’s proscribed weapons, my colleagues and I had our eyes on the human dimension of the conflict.
In Iraq, we became familiar with a society in which youngsters had less education than their parents, where the infrastructure was rotten beyond repair, where criminal gangs close to the regime ruled all the country’s trade and smuggling routes, and where the only thing that held society together was fear. In 2003 the United States and its allies had set out to create a “new Iraq” on the ruins of the old one. This ambitious agenda underestimated the damage that had been done to the Iraqi people in the thirteen years since the Gulf War.
In New York, we saw the institution that was supposed to stand for international order break its own laws for seven years. The UN Security Council operated much like a drug cartel, fighting over access to Iraq’s oil and, in so doing, letting the Iraqi dictator cannibalize his own country in partnership with our most respectable international corporations.
A strange conspiracy of silence had prevailed for many years. The Clinton and Bush administrations had been intimately aware of the massive fraud. French and Russian government officials had directly participated in it, as had officials from all over Europe, South Africa, Australia, India, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, among others. Reuters, the Associated Press, and most news organizations with correspondents in Iraq had ample evidence as well. As did we, the humanitarian community of the United Nations.
I was determined to break that silence now. But I couldn’t care less how the unfolding “scandal” ranked in the annals of history. It was merely the third act of a tragic story that highlighted some of the core flaws of our international system and the frightening, corrupting power of the black elixir that fuels the world economy. From the end of the cold war to the onset of the “war on terror,” the Iraq conflict can be looked at as a mirror reflecting the evolving nature of our global political power game.
In order to explain what happened, I would need to describe the events and the attitudes that prevailed at the United Nations during this critical era in international affairs—a time during which I came of age.
As I stepped out of the plane in Washington, D.C., my neighbor insisted we exchange business cards. When he read mine, he looked up at me.
“So it’s you! The guy in the article.…”
Well, I can’t say I recognized myself in the article’s depiction. I had never thought of myself as a whistleblower. I had stayed loyal as long as I could.
I knew there would be no going back on this decision. But it was a lonely road. Between the UN-bashers who were hyping up my appearance and the UN-apologists who resented it, I felt everyone in this affair somehow fell into rank behind interest groups that could protect them—except me. What I had to say would not flatter any side in this conflict.
The choice, as I saw it, was between cynicism and candor. If all of us insisted that we really cared about the people of Iraq as much as we professed, then this story could only be described as a conspiracy of saints. Alternatively, we could accept that what made this episode in recent history possible was not so much the lies we told one another but the lies we told ourselves.