When I eventually told Spooky about this episode, he beamed with pride. Having the foreign minister of Iraq call him a snake was like a medal of honor for him. I didn’t mention that Pasha had told the Iraqi minister he intended to have the snake defanged, though, because I assumed Pasha had not been serious. Assumptions were really all I had to work with when it came to Pasha.

Before leaving, Pasha raised the issue of our Danish colleague, who sat in our UN compound awaiting possible trial in a Baghdad court. “Please, Mr. Foreign Minister. Let me take him home with me when I leave the country.” He pleaded. I was relieved that he had finally brought up the subject I had been pestering him with for days.

“The Danish citizen is now in Iraq,” said Sahaf, “and he will have to be tried according to Iraqi law.”

Iraqi law. Right.

That evening, upon returning to headquarters, I saw the Danish guard waiting for us in the cafeteria. He came toward us, and I quickly made a sign saying, “Not now.” I didn’t want Halliday, who was right there, to see us talking. He walked over to the bathroom, and a minute later, I excused myself to join him. I found him there washing his hands, waiting for an Iraqi driver to exit. I decided to wash my hands too, should someone else walk in on us. I told him in whispers what had happened. He stood no chance of getting out of Iraq without a trial. At least not with the approval of the Iraqi government. His face dropped.

“Do you have a plan B?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s dangerous.”

“How would it work?”

“We have other Danish guys up north. They can drive down, hide me in their car, and smuggle me past the checkpoints. We can’t go out through Jordan, but if we can make it up to the Kurdish mountains, I can cross over to Turkey.”

“All right, buddy. My advice is to go for plan B,” I said.

“Shit.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to organize it,” he said. “I can’t communicate with them from here. Our lines are bugged!”

I had assumed they would be. But what had surprised me was that even our fax and copy room was manned by an Iraqi national. Every fax and every report we ever handled went through this room, and the Iraqi guy in charge could easily make doubles of everything.

“I’m going up to Kurdistan with my boss in a few days. There I will make contact with the Danish guards and explain your situation. I can then take a message back to you.”

“Why don’t you guys just take me with you to Kurdistan?”

“Our drivers are Iraqis. We’d have to convince Pasha or Halliday to hide you.”

“Too dangerous.”

“I agree. Halliday doesn’t like you for some reason.”

“He thinks I’m crazy! I’d like to see his face if he had to do jail time in Iraq!”

“I’ll talk to the Danes. We’ll make it work.”

We looked into each other’s eyes for a beat, then he shook my hand firmly, holding me to my promise.

“Only talk to the Danes. Nobody else.”

“Got it. We’ll talk when I get back.”

The vice president of Iraq, Taha Yassin Ramadan, was next on our schedule. The meeting was to take place at one of the presidential palaces to which the arms inspectors had been refused access when they searched for weapons of mass destruction.

The contention that economic sanctions would somehow lead to the overthrow of the Iraqi regime crumbled in front of my eyes as we drove into the palace. The level of security was staggering. Our convoy of white vehicles was stopped twice by heavily armed guards—these elite troops looked nothing like the soldiers we could see manning roadblocks around Baghdad. They bore no resemblance to the famished, shoeless troops who had given themselves up in droves as U.S.-led forces pushed into Iraq and Kuwait in 1990. They were extremely well equipped and moved with fierce discipline. Two separate rows of guarded fences separated the palace grounds from the outside world, with heavy weaponry positioned throughout.

Had a group of hungry, fed-up Iraqis tried to storm such a place, they would have been mowed down mercilessly in a matter of seconds, and that’s only if they were lucky. Prison and torture were far worse prospects for Iraqis suspected of rebellious activity. I had read up on how Saddam’s regime dealt with its political opponents.

A 2001 Amnesty International report specifically noted that “victims of torture in Iraq [were] subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks.… Some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage.” The total number of torture subjects may never be available, but the terror these methods spread reached all strata of the Iraqi population, including members of Saddam’s own family, forty of whom were killed by the Iraqi dictator.

Ramadan, the man we were here to meet, had been in charge of suppressing the Shiites of southern Iraq during that time. He had without question been one of Saddam’s top honchos on a number of dirty jobs. He was openly referred to as one of Saddam’s “enforcers.” He was at Saddam’s side from the very beginning and was so zealously loyal to him that he had managed never to be purged. Of the original band of criminals who executed the 1968 coup that put the Baath Party in power, he was the only one to have survived at Saddam’s side.

Born to a family of farmers in the region of Mosul in northeast Iraq, Ramadan began his career as a bank clerk after completing his secondary education. From 1968 onward, he remained on the Revolutionary Command Council, which ruled until 2003. Among his known exploits that earned him Saddam Hussein’s trust, he headed a kangaroo court in 1970 that sentenced forty-four officers to death for plotting to overthrow the regime. He also led the People’s Army, a large paramilitary force at the service of the regime. It was disbanded in 1991 when he became vice president. Ramadan was accused by Iraqi exiles of crimes against humanity for his role in crushing the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 (estimated to have caused anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 deaths) and for his involvement in the killing of thousands of Kurds in the north in 1988. Ramadan followed every one of Saddam’s orders to the letter and often went overboard just to please his boss. Once, after Saddam had jokingly criticized his ministers for putting on too much weight, the guy went on a diet and lost twenty-seven kilograms. That’s almost sixty pounds! Now that’s motivation. I suppose he didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the torture chambers he was overseeing.

As I stepped out of the car, I noticed that our driver, an Iraqi intelligence officer, was sweating profusely. Just setting foot inside the palace grounds made him horribly nervous. We had another Iraqi government official with us from the protocol, whom we called by his first name, Adnan, because he had this apologetic way about him that made me think he was an easygoing man who had been born in the wrong country at the wrong time.

Walking into the palace, seven UN officials led by Pasha and me passed a life-size picture of young Saddam Hussein in a Rambo-like pose, clutching a heavy-duty machine gun and smiling to the camera from atop a pickup truck. He looked really happy—like he had just been shooting at people. This was not a picture I had seen in the media before, and I would have loved to take a photo, but we were forbidden to carry anything other than pen and paper into the meeting. Vice President Ramadan had escaped two assassination attempts that year alone, so even though we were visiting UN officials, the security check was rigorous. After passing metal detectors and getting patted down, felt up, and forced to empty our pockets, we were led into a vast rectangular room furnished in gold, pink, and cream Louis XIV furniture and opulent crystal chandeliers. The Iraqi protocol officer accompanying us from the Foreign Ministry was pale with fear at the thought of being in the vice president’s presence, and the rest of us were on edge, too. We sat silently for several minutes. I spotted a large mirror stuck to the wall at one end of the room. Was the meeting being videotaped?

Finally, the vice president walked in. His handshake was feeble and fleeing, which suited me just fine. I could rationalize that I was doing my job, but my intrinsic hatred for men of his kind made me wonder what we were doing here to begin with. Why was the UN engaged in talks with this government? Had it not violated every principle our organization stood for? And could we sit here and talk shop with Ramadan without even mentioning his regime’s crimes against humanity, against the UN Charter?

The answer would have to be yes. Talking to criminals like Taha Yassin Ramadan was a necessary component of making the Oil-for-Food program work. The minister of foreign affairs did not have a tenth of Ramadan’s power. Saddam had trusted this former bank teller and torturer with running the humanitarian program for the Iraqi side. I suppose this should have tipped us off as to Saddam’s intentions.

An expression of disdain was pasted onto Ramadan’s face. A gun holster hung from his hip. Inside was a silver .45 Magnum with an ivory handle. The gun’s barrel pointed forward (toward us) when he sat down, which was not exactly a comfortable feeling. He remained silent for a few moments, which Pasha interpreted as an invitation to speak.

It was not. Pasha had hardly uttered a sentence when the vice president cut him off. The contempt on Ramadan’s face was unmistakable. He began to speak through an interpreter, blasting the United States, Britain, and the UN for what seemed an eternity, occasionally raising his voice in a threatening manner, causing his interpreter, a scrawny little mouse of a man, to try to do the same. Evidently, they were a practiced duo.

The VP would occasionally pause and fiddle with his gun holster, making it abundantly clear that Pasha wasn’t invited to talk. In fact, the vice president barely looked at Pasha the whole meeting, and so Pasha had the opportunity to throw some glances around the room. At one point, he did something incredible. Looking at Adnan, the protocol officer and the only Iraqi official we had sort of befriended, Pasha did an imitation of the vice president fiddling with his gun holster. This almost caused us to explode in laughter. I was able to contain myself only by looking down at my notes, but when I glanced at the Iraqi protocol officer, I saw that his face was painfully contorted. His jaw was trembling. Poor Adnan had tears in his eyes. I figured his only possible escape route, if Ramadan suddenly looked at him, was to pretend to be crying.

Ramadan’s soliloquy lasted about thirty minutes. During that time, he complained that the Oil-for-Food program had stripped Iraq of its sovereignty and that our very presence in Iraq was insulting. Having basically accused us of being a bunch of spies (Spooky was not alone now), the VP finally stopped talking. Pasha didn’t even try to give him the runaround. After all, the man had a gun, and there were pretty good chances it was loaded. So he said a few polite words about how we would do our best to help the people of Iraq. Pasha then tried to extend an invitation for the vice president to visit New York, but Ramadan replied that the last time he had set foot in UN headquarters, he had met only liars and traitors who were at the beck and call of manipulative Zionists. Nice try, Pasha. Now we had the vice president going off on a rant again, complaining about the imperialist/Zionist conspiracy to undermine Iraq’s sovereignty, which, he reminded us, was protected by international law.

It’s an interesting thing about international law: even those who trample it most violently and most often can occasionally be caught touting its merits.

Ramadan let a beat pass to let that last point sink in, then he ordered Pasha to finish his coffee. Pasha picked up his cup with a grateful nod and a side glance at me, urging me to imitate him.

To sit there and be lectured about international law by this criminal, and to hear my boss address him as “Your Excellency,” was nauseating. I had to ask myself what we were doing there drinking coffee with him. What service were we rendering to the Iraqi people by treating this monster with the highest respect? Sure, we needed the Iraqi government’s cooperation to make the humanitarian program work. But why were we acting as if we had no bargaining power?

I imagined what would happen if, in the middle of Ramadan’s delirious and hateful rant, Pasha had gotten up, said he’d had enough, that he had gotten the clear impression that the Iraqi government was not interested in extending sincere cooperation to the UN, and that he would go back to New York and report this to the UN Security Council. Then what?

Ramadan would probably have taken it down a notch and started treating us with a minimum amount of respect. For his alternative would have been to go tell his boss—the man for whom he had recently lost sixty pounds over a passing remark—that he had just screwed up their biggest opportunity to make money since the end of the Gulf War.

Of course, Pasha couldn’t do this. He had to think about the Iraqi people. Any interruption in our operation would hurt them before it hurt the Iraqi regime. And second, such behavior likely would have cost Pasha his job. When Richard Butler, the chief UN weapons inspector, confronted the Iraqi regime too zealously in 1998, Russia and France demanded that he be fired (and fired he was). It would have been a different situation if the UN Security Council were united in confronting Saddam’s regime. Then UN diplomats would have been able to hold Iraqi leaders to their word and to judge their deeds exactly as the resolutions intended. But the world we had created for ourselves with this unusual program forced us to compromise at every turn. Did it mean we were on our way to compromising ourselves?

Pasha put his cup down, and the vice president nodded to his interpreter, signaling the end of the meeting. From our point of view, the encounter had been useless. From theirs, it had probably meant to serve as an intimidation session. Our failure to stand up to this kind of bullying would eventually cause us, and the organization we worked for, great harm. But as we exited the vice president’s palace, we couldn’t quite envisage a world in which the man we had just met with would be sitting behind bars and put on trial by the people he had oppressed.

We got to meet some of these people and witness their suffering firsthand. But this only played to the regime’s advantage, because the more suffering we witnessed the more we wanted to help, and the more we wanted to help the easier it would be for Saddam and his cronies to manipulate our humanitarian efforts for their personal gain.

In the years to come, the Iraqi dictator would prove more successful than any world leader at playing the game of UN politics. Not only would he use our program to fill his own pockets with billions of dollars; he would also use it to buy support in the UN Security Council. In the end, this multiple violator of international law would succeed in turning the UN into a defensive shield against the world’s largest superpower. That one of the world’s most vicious human rights abusers finally succeeded in turning international law to his advantage remains an astounding achievement, in the grand scheme of history. Woodrow Wilson had led America into the very unpopular First World War and launched the League of Nations in order, he said, to make the world “safe for democracy.” What we were doing through this masquerade of a humanitarian mission was making the world safer for Saddam’s dictatorship. So safe, in fact, that America would once again perceive him (rightly or wrongly) as a threat, years later, when the onset of the “war on terror” reshaped the Bush administration’s strategic outlook. By that time, our mission had become tragically distorted, and our reputations—in some cases our lives—had been destroyed.

But far from imagining what the future held in store for us, as we left Vice President Ramadan’s palace, our thoughts were with Adnan, who had almost lost his composure to a frightening fit of laughter.

“Poor Adnan,” said Pasha, as we got back in the car.

“I know! How did he keep it together?” I wondered. “I thought he was going to explode.”

“If he had laughed…” Pasha started. Then, instead of finishing his sentence, he looked at me and sliced his own throat with his thumb.

Adnan joined us in the car, riding shotgun. We stayed silent for a moment, each of us looking out of our respective windows. When our eyes connected again, Pasha blinked at me, then tapped on Adnan’s shoulder and repeated his move, imitating the vice president fidgeting with his gun. This time Adnan exploded in laughter. The chauffeur was observing us with suspicion. Only after we passed the first public poster of Saddam was Adnan able to regain control.

The freedom to laugh, I realized, had never been mentioned in any text of human rights law. We hear about freedom of expression or of association. But at heart, can either of those freedoms truly exist if the people don’t have the right to laugh at their leaders?

As I pondered the question, I wondered how much “freedom of expression” I might have within the UN itself. Was this an organization that could withstand ridicule? Or would all the compromises we made with tyrants, and hence with our own declared principles, restrict my ability to tell the truth as I saw it?