UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER 1997
“How did you lose all that weight?” a curious colleague asked upon my return from Iraq. We were having lunch at the best cafeteria in New York, on the ground floor of the UN Secretariat building, speaking in half-hushed voices for fear that a group of interns might catch us in the act of having a male-diet talk. My friend had tried the Zone diet and the “eat all you want but only once a day” diet, and had recently abandoned the Atkins™ diet, on which he had gained five pounds and acquired the gift of high blood pressure. He now exercised three times a week, never cooked with butter, forced broccoli down his throat at lunch, and had low-fat sugar-free frozen yogurt for dinner. Two weeks of that and he had lost only two miserable pounds.
“You should try the Baghdad diet,” I said.
I had lost a good fifteen pounds in Iraq.
“Really? How does it work?”
I advised my colleague that he might achieve similar results if he used laxatives irresponsibly. The weight I had lost was due to my stomach’s stubborn refusal to cooperate with the bacteria found in most foods available in Iraq. Oh, well. At least I had gained a clear firsthand understanding of how our UN sanctions affected that country’s sanitary standards.
If one thing was abundantly clear from our first mission to Iraq, it was that the population needed more, better-quality food, and more effective and clean means to distribute it. The UN ration consisted of a bucket of flour, some rice, some cooking oil, some chickpeas, salt, tea, sugar, powdered milk, and soap. We called it the “food basket,” as if it was a gift from Citarella. But in reality Iraqis had to queue for hours with old plastic containers to get their monthly grub. There were more than three thousand distribution centers around the country, and the government required people in line to show ID, because there were no second servings.
With that, we had the nerve to send our “UN observers” out to the villages to ask people how they felt about the menu. It would have been a death mission were it not for the Iraqi government minders who accompanied them on every trip.
Who in this world would want the UN to decide what they get to eat? Those who didn’t throw stones at our white SUVs, or insult our observers, informed us that they wouldn’t mind more variety in their diet. As for quality, they would plead with us for servings of chickpeas that didn’t contain stones in them, soap that didn’t create rashes, and oil that didn’t taste like petrol.
The Iraqi government was in charge of contracting for these commodities, so the UN was not in a position to affect the quality of the food that was ordered. Saddam Hussein consistently spent as little as possible on food and as much as possible on industrial goods that might be diverted to his security apparatus. From a technical standpoint, all the food that was distributed to Iraq’s civilians had been declared fit for human consumption by the Iraqi authorities. But according to the consumers, it was fit for dogs. Personally, I wouldn’t wish to be the owner of a dog afflicted with the condition I developed in Iraq.
The unsafe drinking water, mixed with the powdered milk, provoked life-threatening diarrhea in young children. There was an urgent need to pump more money into the water sector. And the electricity sector. And the agricultural sector. And the transportation sector. The “food basket” often lacked key ingredients, because there were not enough trucks to transport the food or because the truckers weren’t getting paid by the government—or, as we later learned, because the trucks had been repainted green and were pulling cannons for Iraq’s army.
In the case of severely malnourished children, staple foods were not sufficient to bring them back to health. They needed special medical care and high-protein foods with vitamin supplements in order to survive. So we’d have to think of equipping hospitals with special child-nutrition units. But the challenges quickly compounded as we considered them in detail. For example, most hospitals did not even have reliable electricity and couldn’t store certain foods and medicines, so even when we focused narrowly on saving malnourished kids, we were also forced to consider wider challenges, like how to repair Iraq’s bombed-out electrical grid, its water supply, and so on.
Iraq didn’t need an Oil-for-Food program. It needed an Oil-for-Everything-Except Weapons program. But of course, Iraq’s needs were one thing. What mattered, in the final analysis, was what the UN Security Council would allow through. Our ability to get more goods into Iraq was linked to progress on the weapons front. The UN inspectors continued to make discoveries that were far from reassuring to Western powers. UNSCOM had recently reported that it had uncovered the existence of an active “offensive biological warfare programme.” In addition, UNSCOM inspectors had found samples and traces of the chemical nerve agent VX and other advanced chemical weapons capabilities; they had also dismantled Iraq’s indigenous production of long-range-missile engines. Following these discoveries, UNSCOM directed and supervised the destruction or dismantling of several facilities and large quantities of equipment used to produce chemical and biological weapons as well as proscribed long-range missiles.
If the U.S. Army had found only half as many WMD materials when it eventually invaded Iraq, the Bush administration might have preserved a modicum of credibility. Ironically, it turned out that UNSCOM had done a better job than most observers ever expected. Saddam probably also got rid of any and all WMD-related materials that remained unaccounted for before the war—which may explain why the man kept laughing every time his face appeared on television. But back in 1998, he wasn’t laughing as much. His grip on power had been weakened, and his only chance of strengthening his regime again was to abuse our humanitarian program and keep the world guessing about his potential WMD capacity, should any of his neighbors or his own people be tempted to repay him for the harm he had caused them in the past. Of course, we will never know the inner workings of the dictator’s mind, but back in 1998, as we considered how to improve our humanitarian operation, UNSCOM and Baghdad were averaging a new crisis every couple of months. So if we wanted the Security Council to allow more goods into Iraq, we would need to make a convincing pitch on behalf of the Iraqi people.
Job number one was to establish what the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people were. This assumed we could come up with a clear definition of what constituted a “humanitarian need,” as opposed to any other needs humans have as they struggle to make their way through life and provide for their offspring. Job number two was to assure the members of the Security Council that they could let us meet those needs without screwing up their sanctions against Saddam. This, of course, was a highly unrealistic proposition.
Thus began the process of designing a new UN humanitarian program for Iraq. The Security Council drafts its laws based on reports presented by the UN Secretariat. So it is rather critical that those reports be clear and factually correct, and that they propose options that might help the Security Council adopt “resolutions” that result in concrete, helpful action.
The laws passed by the Security Council are called “resolutions” perhaps in part to preempt the public from questioning that body’s actual resolve in dealing with certain problems. Every year it adopts dozens of such “resolutions,” and it may be said that the institution’s members are about as good at following through on their resolutions as most people are at sticking to their own New Year’s resolutions come February.
In order to consider resolutions, the Security Council must be “seized” with a particular matter. To seize the ambassadors’ attention, the UN Secretariat submits reports about given situations with suggestions that might, if Security Council members can agree, be adopted into laws that are supposed to be binding on all states.
Now, how do such reports, which are also written by committee, come to life inside an organization riddled with internal turf wars, petty office politics, dramatic personal rivalries, and, in our case, a shameless competition for control over more money than the UN system had ever seen?
It was easy to see how the process might quickly degenerate. So I was somewhat relieved when I was informed that all sides of our UN operation had agreed to approach the drafting process in a “scientific” manner. Science implies orderly procedures, factual assumptions, and technical method.
The technical term for what we were doing was a “bottom-up review” of Iraq’s humanitarian needs, and it was highly scientific indeed, as the episode concerning the proposed inclusion of canned cheese in the Iraqi people’s diet illustrates.
The idea had come from Denis Halliday, who, quite justifiably, had concluded that the Iraqi people needed more animal protein. East Village nutritionists will argue that “you can find all the proteins you need in soy,” but an Iraqi mother cooking for her family wouldn’t know what to do with soy. And when dealing with stunted, underweight children, the best way to help them is actually to provide them with nutrients rich in animal protein and calcium. The problem, of course, was that the powdered milk we were providing was more dangerous than helpful when mixed with bad water. Other forms of animal protein are very expensive and need to be transported and stored in a cold chain, which Iraq did not have the electricity to maintain. Canned cheese, though an acquired taste, did not require refrigeration and provided a cheaper source of protein than meat or fish.
Halliday therefore made a proposal for a multimillion-dollar purchase of canned cheese. Fifteen minutes after we had submitted the proposal to Pasha for clearance, I heard a ruckus in his office. I ran over to check if he was all right.
“Facking Halliday!” said Pasha, holding up Halliday’s fax in one hand and slapping it with the other.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Why da fack do they need all this canned cheese?” he thundered.
“Um… protein, sir?”
“Protein my ass! Who eats cheese out of a can? Show me one facking Iraqi who’ll eat cheese out of a can!”
As we didn’t have such a “facking Iraqi” on hand to give us his opinion on the matter, out went the canned cheese. It soon became evident that Pasha and Halliday had radically different views as to what constituted a “bottom-up review” of Iraq’s humanitarian needs. In devising his proposals with nutrition experts in the field, Halliday had not foreseen that some of the ideas would be shot down in New York with comments like “protein my ass.”
From the onset of the exercise, Pasha had been reticent about the whole “bottom-up” thing. “It’s my ass on the line,” he would insist. “Not Halliday’s! So I’ll tell you where he can shove his bottom-up review…”
Say no more, Pasha… say no…
“Up his bottom!”
After the canned cheese episode, Pasha took to calling Halliday’s report the “Up-the-Bottom” review rather than the bottom-up review. The new name of the report became such common usage that I worried Pasha might mistakenly use the wrong term when addressing the Security Council.
We had serious concerns about how our proposals would be received by the Security Council, and in particular by the United States. In advocating for a massive expansion of the humanitarian program, we were threatening America’s containment policy.
The United States was not against the importation of more food per se. But Washington was reticent to allow for the rehabilitation of Iraq’s heavy industry, for it saw every nut and bolt as a potential component in the fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. Fertilizers for agriculture could be used to make explosives. Centrifuges for Iraq’s pharmaceutical plants could be used to produce deadly biological toxins, chlorine gas for water purification could also be (and had been) used to spray chemical weapons at Kurdish villages. A long list of products were thus branded as “dual-use items.” The dilemma, when it came to such products as chlorine gas, was that unsafe water had killed far more Iraqis since the Gulf War than Saddam Hussein’s proscribed chemical weapons. In the balancing act between containing Saddam and saving Iraq’s civilians, we, at the UN Secretariat, chose the civilians.
As we toiled to find the right formula to persuade the UN Security Council to expand the Oil-for-Food program, the infighting grew. The canned cheese battle was merely the first of many. Everyone, it seemed, had their own ideas as to what the Iraqi people should eat, how much money should go into water purification, transportation, agriculture, and so on. UNICEF, the children’s health agency, sought funding for breastfeeding campaigns; FAO, the agricultural agency, was fighting for animal vaccinations (some strange malady called “foot-and-mouth disease” had spread through Iraq’s ruminant herds); and UNESCO, the cultural branch, was whipping up a storm about education (the children needed school desks, schoolbooks, etc.).
An avalanche of projects landed on our desks. Our photocopier went on strike and our fax machine was making pleading noises. I arranged the projects into paper skyscrapers in the conference room and told Pasha it was time for him to assemble his crisis team, composed of Spooky; a guy whose nickname was Dracula (for reasons that shall become clear); a woman called Cindy (Pasha’s special assistant, who didn’t yet have a bizarre nickname); and me, The Kid.
“So, what do we do with all this shit?” wondered Pasha, looking at all the unstable paper piles on the table.
It was a good question. We couldn’t just dump $50 billion worth of projects on the Security Council’s doorstep and say, “Here, you deal with it.”
“We’ll probably need to set priorities,” said Spooky.
“Who are we to set priorities?” asked Dracula.
“We can ask the field mission to do it—again,” said Spooky. We had asked Halliday to prioritize the projects to begin with, but he chose to drown us instead.
“We’ll need to set a ceiling,” I said.
“What ceiling?” said Pasha.
“Well, if we want to prioritize projects, we need to know how much money Iraq can spend. Meaning how much oil they can pump.”
“That’s no longer a bottom-up approach,” said Dracula.
“Fuck the bottom-up approach!” said Pasha. “The Kid is right. If the Iraqis can only pump $5 billion, it’s no use coming up with projects for $10 billion!”
Dracula had to agree.
Pasha turned to his special assistant. “Bring in the oil overseers!” he said, and then headed back to his office. A few minutes later, in came the strange individuals known as “the oil overseers.” A tall, gawky Russian and a high-strung little Frenchman appeared at the door and were invited to sit on Pasha’s couch.
“How much oil money can Iraq generate every six months?” asked Pasha.
“Zat is impossible to predict,” said the Frenchman. “It depends on ze price of ze euil!”
“I know that the price, it flucturates,” said Pasha, doing a wave with his hand.
“Fluc-tu-ates,” the Frenchman corrected.
“What?”
“Ze price.… It fluc-tu-ates,” insisted the Frenchman.
“You think I’m a facking idiot?” growled Pasha.
“Euh… neuh, of curse nut.”
“I’m getting fed up with you guys, OK? You sit there all day long facking picking your nose while we’re working our ass off here, so don’t get me started!”
Pasha was right. The oil overseers, whom we took to calling the Double-O’s, in part because they were secretive as spies and in part because they had twice times nothing to do all day long, were tasked with a job that required about half a day of real work per month. But it was an important half-day, so important that the Security Council would fight for months on end each time a new overseer had to be appointed. Their job was to check that the price of Iraqi oil matched market prices, in order to prevent Saddam from receiving kickbacks from oil traders. In this task, the Double-O’s would ultimately fail by a margin of billions of dollars. But at this stage, we merely had to get a number out of them: how much money could Iraq generate from its oil sales? And just doing that wasn’t easy, because they would have to decide whether to include in their projection the oil Iraq was smuggling out of the country illegally—a political hot potato, which the oil overseers were not willing to touch. As all oil professionals understood from the very beginning of this operation, we were dealing with two sets of numbers when it came to oil transactions: official numbers and real numbers (most deals with oil-producing dictatorships leave room for bribes and kickbacks). Having quickly figured out that neither Pasha nor I was aware of this practice, they found it awkwardly hard to explain the challenge they faced in coming up with a projection of how much oil revenue Iraq might generate during any given six-month phase of the program.
“So just give me a facking projection!” said Pasha. “How much money do you think they can make in six months?”
“Mmmaybeee around four… four or five billiuns, some sing like zat,” said the Frenchman, sounding extremely unsure of himself.
Pasha turned to the Russian.
“And you… why you never talk? Do you agree?”
“It dipiends vuot about dzia price, but I siyenk my kholieg is corriect.”
To which the Frenchman added, “But pleeze dun’t queute us. We cannut be ze source for zis number.”
Pasha nodded and did that thing with his bushy eyebrows that meant the Double-O’s could leave his office now before he got any angrier. If we couldn’t quote our own UN oil overseers, who could we quote? The fact is, these guys did not really see Pasha as their boss. Their posts were so political that they felt loyalty only to their home countries.
“Can you believe these guys?” said Pasha.
Well, at least we had some kind of estimate, a number to work with: $4 billion to $5 billion per six months. So we decided to aim for the midpoint between the two numbers and settled on a budget of about $4.5 billion every six months. Cutting right through the middle seemed like a safe bet. The British colonial authorities employed the same logic when they designed the borders of the region, often cutting lines right through the midpoint between capitals, which is how maps of the Middle East contain so many straight (and continuously contested) lines. In a sense, not much had changed since colonial times. Today we, a group of UN bureaucrats, had become the czars of Iraq’s economy; and based on the vague advice of the Double-O’s, Iraq’s budget would be $4.5 billion per semester, or $9 billion a year.
After further negotiations with Halliday, who raged that we had sabotaged his “bottom-up approach” and stabbed the Iraqi people in the back, we ended up raising the budget to $5.2 billion every six months, or $10.4 billion per year. The UN’s own annual budget was around $2.2 billion. Syria’s annual budget revenues were less than $7 billion. We were essentially lifting all civilian sanctions on Iraq.
“This is never going to fly,” said Dracula. “The Americans will never agree to it.”
We looked at one another in silence. It was around Christmastime. We were sitting around in the conference room, exhausted by a month of constant disputes, waiting for a pizza to be delivered to the office. It was around 10:30 at night and pissing rain outside.
Pasha returned from the restrooms with the pizza. He had intercepted the delivery man en route and slapped him on the neck by surprise, causing him to drop the pizzas in the corridor, so the opened box looked a bit chaotic, with some slices overturned and others missing the cheese, which had slid off and stuck to the carton lid.
“Here… eat!” said Pasha, as if speaking to famished sled dogs. Not that we felt very different. Pasha had driven us hard through the past two months, keeping us in the office late and throwing fits every time “facking Halliday” sent in a new project.
As we munched, Pasha looked at each of us quizzically; at some point he popped the question. “So that’s it? $5.2 billion?”
Everybody nodded except Dracula.
“What?” said Pasha.
“It’s never going to fly,” said Dracula, as he had all week.
“So you have a better number for me?” asked Pasha.
“No,” said Dracula. “I think it’s the right number, but it might not pass the Council.”
“Unless anybody has a better idea, that’s it. That’s the magic number,” said Pasha.
“Inshallah,” said Dracula.
“Spooky?” asked Pasha.
“It’s a tough one. Her Majesty’s Government might buy it, but the Americans, I don’t know…”
“Kid?”
“Maybe we can…”
“Shadap!”
All right, I could bear being the object of comic relief, but the fact was, I was an integral part of a small team that had very limited competence on the matter to begin with, so after a round of laughter, Pasha nodded at me again to share my thought.
“Maybe we could sound out the Americans?” I said. “I mean, we’d have to share the same info with all the big five, but if the U.S. doesn’t challenge us, who else will?”
“They’re called the P5, Michael, not the big five,” Spooky whispered in my ear as Pasha considered the option of sharing the magic number with the five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council. The practice is often used, mainly to shield the Secretariat from the embarrassment of making proposals that are immediately trashed by a veto. But Pasha was shaking his head.
“No,” he said, firmly. “Nobody speaks to anybody outside this room.”
“But they’ve already called and asked,” said Spooky.
“Nobody talks,” said Pasha, looking each of us in the eye, one after the other, the way Tony Soprano does when he needs everyone in his gang to be on the same page. Pasha then threw his napkin back on the table and stood up.
“Nobody talks,” he repeated as he walked out. “Let me handle this.”
Pasha liked to play his cards close to his chest. He knew that if he announced the magic number in advance, the United States would raise hell. It would be far easier for the United States to challenge us face-to-face than in front of the entire Security Council. So I concluded that Pasha was smart to reject my proposal. His plan was to drop a bombshell on the Security Council and let the states fight it out amongst themselves. The French and the Russians and the Chinese would welcome our proposals, for sure. And the United States and Britain would find themselves on the defensive, having to come up with arguments for why Iraq should not benefit from this or that humanitarian project. They would inevitably look heartless, something any government prefers to do in private rather than in public.
“The Americans have other ways of finding out,” said Spooky, eyeing the wall.
“Sure,” said Pasha, “but as long as they don’t hear it from us directly, they can’t discuss it with us, can they?”
Logical. The United States was not supposed to be listening in on UN staff.
But sure enough, the next day, the U.S. deputy ambassador and an aide came storming into our office all red in the face, demanding to be told the magic number. Pasha played dumb, saying he couldn’t tell them since he didn’t yet know it himself.
The U.S. diplomats walked out even more furious than when they walked in. They went to the secretary general’s office, only to get the runaround again. So they sent less important officials to try to get us to speak to them one-on-one. But we had our marching orders. Officially, they were told that we were still identifying which projects to include in our proposals, and in a very real sense we were. We just knew what number these proposals were supposed to add up to.
Hours before submitting the report to the printer, I got it into my head to run a check on the numbers to see if they added up to the total figure we were about to recommend. It turned out they did not. I barged into Pasha’s office in a state of absolute panic. Either we were missing a project or we had taken one out without changing the total. Pasha went absolutely bonkers. There was obviously a limit to how much incompetence the UN could get away with, and having Kofi Annan appear in front of the Security Council with a report that didn’t add up just about crossed that line.
With the clock ticking furiously loud, I sat down at my desk to try to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, I was a Microsoft Excel virgin. Besides, numbers have never been my forte. I could hardly trust myself with figuring out the tip on a bar check, and here I was trying to fix the annual budget for an entire country. Having Pasha, Cindy, Dracula, and Spooky breathing down my neck while I tried to manipulate the spreadsheet didn’t make my work any easier. But I was the only young person around, and everybody always assumes young people are better with computers. I finally got the UN treasurer on the phone and conferenced in our office in Baghdad to cross-check some of the information. An hour before our deadline, I thought all was lost. I had identified the problem, but I couldn’t get the spreadsheet to do what I wanted it to do—and the little Microsoft “paper-clip guy” in the corner of my screen kept distracting me with viciously useless and doubt-provoking questions. I made a mental note to track down the programmer who had conceived that spineless little paper-clip motherfucker and assassinate him.
I finally called a friend of mine who worked at a bank. Letting a private-sector friend in on numbers that some firms would pay lots of money to get their paws on was a risk I took only as a last resort. After he finished laughing at how clueless I was in operating a rather basic spreadsheet, he guided me through to completion in a New York minute.
The spreadsheet was the most important page in the report. It outlined how the money would be distributed among the different Iraqi ministries, which operated in the south and center of Iraq, and among the nine UN agencies that were in charge of buying goods for the Kurdish regions in the north. The rest of the report contained lengthy descriptions of the state of each of Iraq’s economic sectors, the needs identified by our observers, and the kinds of projects that needed to take priority if Iraq was to regain the semblance of a functioning economy. There was much more information than the ambassadors sitting on the Security Council cared to read, and even their assistants would complain to us that we had swamped them with too much text. This, of course, was the crux of Pasha’s old-school reporting strategy. By muddying the big picture with an abundance of tiresome and awkwardly committee-drafted technical details, we had significantly reduced the chances of being challenged on the substance or the “science” that helped us finally divide the pie. Most missions would have had to hire troops of specialized PhD holders to sift through all of our statements adequately and prepare focused talking points for debate. Nobody had time for that. As for the numerous promises we made about how we would strengthen our capacity to capably oversee the enormous increase in transactions and shipments, all the United States and Britain could really do was take us at our word. One thing would be certain: there would be no unemployment within the UN system as long as this operation ran. And since all new posts would be paid for by Iraqi money, none of the ambassadors felt the need to question our operational costs or how efficiently our new resources would be used.
When the report finally went to press, and the magic figure was divulged, U.S. diplomats did little, privately, to hide their anger at what they saw as an act of UN defiance. But what would their response be? How would they vote in the Security Council? The U.S. government now needed to develop an actual policy on how to respond. In the couple of days leading up to the crucial meeting at which Kofi Annan would present the report to the Security Council, the United States scrambled to come up with one. Now it was our turn to invite them out to lunch to try to find out what their government’s reaction would be—and their turn to play their cards close to their chest.
The meeting was closed to the media and held in the informal chamber of the Security Council. The Iraqis were sitting outside, smoking cigarettes. The media was out in full force, including a special breed of reporters who cover the oil markets. Every member state of the UN wanted to know what would happen, because it meant potential business openings with the oil giant, so the crowd outside the Security Council was filled with smiling information mercenaries.
On the way in, I passed my former boss, CNN’s Richard Roth. We joked about my crossing over to the “other side.” He asked if I thought our proposals would “fly.” I said I hoped they would but that it all depended on the United States at that point. “Doesn’t it always?” came a quip from the aide to the U.S. ambassador, who enjoyed creeping up on people when they spoke about his country. Poker smiles all around, we entered the little room where Security Council ambassadors hash out deals before going public.
There was a lot of tension in the air. To my knowledge, the Security Council had never before been involved in decisions that would have such direct commercial repercussions, so the types of pressures its members were under from their domestic constituencies were of a completely different nature from usual. Australian wheat farmers, French pharmaceutical companies, Russian energy giants—all of these powerful lobbying groups had been talking to their governments.
Ambassadors took turns welcoming the secretary general’s report. Many of them called it “comprehensive,” by which they meant it was too long and convoluted. As often happens in such meetings, the ambassador from the most insignificant country in relation to the issue at hand will launch into long tirades about the moral authority of the United Nations, then trail so far off the subject that others at the table will start taking cellphone calls and exchanging jokes on little pieces of folded paper. In this case, the culprit was assaulted with coughs and nervous tics. Everybody was eager to hear what the United States had to say. There were billions at stake.
Finally, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson took the floor. Somewhat angrily, he “welcomed” the “comprehensive” report of the secretary general and said his government looked forward to studying it in more detail. They would have many questions for us. Like how we planned to guarantee that all these new goods actually got to the people instead of the regime. How we would strengthen all the financial controls to deal with the increased cash flow. All perfectly good questions, for which we had only the vaguest answers, leaving them with nothing to sink their teeth into.
After weeks of backroom negotiations, the Security Council reached a verdict. Our recommendations were adopted unanimously, on February 20, 1998, in Resolution 1153.
Champagne!
We had successfully steered the largest humanitarian operation in UN history out of port. We had made our case on the force of argument and pushed it through to adoption by making wild promises to the Security Council. Forget that Saddam Hussein had remained defiant in the face of allied bombings. We, the bureaucrats of the United Nations, promised we’d keep an eye on him, even as he was now free to sign contracts for dozens of billions of dollars a year.
Stepping away from the bustle of the cocktail party that night, I stood facing Gotham’s skyline. We would now be in command of a formidable machine. Our program paid for the work of the UN arms inspectors and had signed contracts with nine UN agencies, each in charge of monitoring one of Iraq’s economic sectors. We had hired Saybolt S.A., a Dutch company, to monitor Iraq’s oil sales, and Lloyd’s Register of London to check the humanitarian imports at the border. Soon, we’d give that monitoring contract to a new company, Cotecna, based in Switzerland. The fact that Kofi Annan’s son Kojo worked at the company that stood to make millions overseeing the imports of goods into Iraq did not seem to faze those who knew about it. Pasha had not deemed it necessary to mention this potentially grave conflict of interest to us, so we’d have to learn about it through the newspapers some time later. Oh, we’d learn a lot of things about our own operation from news reports as time went by. But right now, the media were presenting our expansion as a successful diplomatic solution to a difficult political situation. The positive media coverage had us walking on air as we prepared to supersize our office, both in New York and in Iraq.
We had some 400 internationals on staff in Iraq and thousands of local employees. Those numbers would grow, as would our office space in New York. We would gobble up entire new floors and monitor billions of dollars in cash flowing through the Banque Nationale de Paris to thousands of companies across the world. There was something strangely exhilarating about it all.
Spooky stepped out onto the balcony.
“To making history!” he said, raising his glass to me in cheers. I took a big sip of the warm Champagne and paused for a moment as I tried to formulate the question that had formed in my mind over the past few weeks.
“Trevor, tell me something… and be honest,” I said as we looked out over New York’s bright lights.
“Honest? I don’t know. If it’s about your tie—”
“No, seriously.”
“Yes, Michael?”
“We’re in way, way over our heads, aren’t we?”
He replied without looking at me. “Oh, yes. Most definitely.”