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-18 Hornets 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 people’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.
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 passage 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.*
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 cargo 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.
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.
* Twenty-three million was the figure we used in 1997. It was based on an outdated and probably erroneous census, but it was the best figure available then. By the time of the invasion in 2003, Iraq’s population was estimated at twenty-four to twenty-five million.