VOLCKER COMMITTEE INTERROGATION ROOM, MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NOVEMBER 19, 2004
“Do you remember this e-mail exchange?” asked the investigator as he handed me a printout of an e-mail I had written years ago.
Seven years after we had launched the largest humanitarian enterprise in UN history, I was sitting in a cold conference room high up in a New York City skyscraper being interrogated by members of the Volcker Committee, named after Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, whom the Security Council had appointed to investigate what amounted to a mammoth train wreck. Billions of dollars entrusted to the Oil-for-Food program had vanished, from right under our nose, and suddenly the world had decided to hold us accountable. As one character said to George Clooney in the movie Syriana, in politics, you’re “innocent until investigated.” That movie was based in part on the experience of Robert Baer, a CIA case officer who ended up under investigation in Washington after he helped Jalal Talabani of northern Iraq foment a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein.
So there I was, feeling less than innocent and wondering what e-mail exchange my interrogator was referring to. As part of its investigation, the Volcker Committee had conducted computer forensics, extracting all of our e-mail communications from the UN database. They were in the process of examining those e-mails meticulously when they suddenly gave me a call. I had already testified with them once. Why were they calling me back?
I felt like a suspect in an old Columbo episode. Just one last question.…
Given the choice, many of us (especially those with a social life) would rather have submitted to a colonoscopy than have strangers peer through our most intimate, silly, ranting e-mails. Especially with my group of friends, who never hesitated to recount a night of debauchery in every detail the next day or to send around pornographic attachments just for the hell of it.
The investigator—a sharp-looking woman with strict hair and an impeccable business suit—was flanked by two silent aides, who took notes with electronic pens directly on the screens of their laptops whenever I opened my mouth. It was quite unnerving. The woman had an air of competence about her. She was looking at a printout, which she had whipped out of her file just as I thought the interview was about to end. She took her time to review its contents as I sat at the edge of my seat.
“In all fairness, I should probably let you read this first.” She slid the sheet of paper across the table.
In all fairness? Why is she saying “in all fairness”? That’s something you say to a GUILTY PERSON!
I grabbed the e-mail and started reading through it. As I did, my mind went back to that morning, that horribly embarrassing morning.…
I knew it would be a bad day as soon as I woke up. My neck was painfully contorted. I swallowed two Excedrin and looked at myself in the mirror. My tongue was white, dry as sandpaper. I was shaving when I noticed it: a huge hickey on my neck.
The New York dating scene had its dangers. The woman who had found it necessary to leave this gory-looking suction mark on my neck the night before had seemed like a perfectly reasonable person at the beginning of the evening. She had mentioned something about her medication not reacting so well with alcohol, but I hadn’t really paid attention because her foot had already begun to play games under the table. When I heard the word “medication” I inquired if she was sick, and she replied, “No, it’s for my brain. I have a chemical imbalance in my brain.”
This was before the Sambuca shots she ordered after our second bottle of Pinot Grigio. She then went to the bathroom and came back with what seemed like a completely new personality. Her eyes were wide open, her fingers often rubbed up against her nose, and her speech had accelerated to the point where I found it hard to grasp when she was switching topics. When we walked out, she had a brilliant idea.
“Let’s go sing karaoke! Come on, just for one song!”
When we finally walked out of our private singing booth, it was 4:30 a.m. and I had fingernail scratch marks on my back. It was there, on the street, that she pulled away from a kiss, gave me a strange look, and suddenly bit into my neck. The blue mark I noticed the next morning was only slightly smaller than a hockey puck.
My secretary was the first to notice it. I noticed her noticing it, and she noticed me noticing her noticing it. So she controlled her smile. But as soon as she left my office, the word started spreading.
“Mickey has a hickey!” And it rhymed.
I did not think it was funny. I was hungover and paranoid and nauseous. I settled in at my desk and tried to draft a press release, a rather difficult task for the one neuron I had left in my brain. One by one, my office mates found reasons to come into my office to check out my stupid hickey. It was a zero-credibility day.
Then the call came from Pasha’s office, which I let slide directly to voicemail. Fortunately, he left a clear message.
“Where the fack are you? Come to my office, right now!”
Uh-oh…
I immediately called back and got his secretary.
“Hey, I just got a call from—”
“Yes, Michael, he’s expecting you.”
“He didn’t sound in a good mood,” I probed.
“You can say that again,” said Pasha’s secretary.
Shit. I hung up, picked up a notebook, and ran down the stairs of my building. Shit, shit, shit. I crossed First Avenue in the rain, passed the security checkpoint of the UN Secretariat building, and ran toward the elevator yelling, “Hold it!” but failing to inspire anybody inside to press a button, much less stick out a hand between the sliding doors.
The checkered black-and-white floor of the UN lobby is quite slippery when wet, and I was forced to hold on to a stranger’s shoulder in order to avoid losing my balance at the end of my run.
“Sorry,” I said, not knowing quite what to add, as the stranger readjusted his shoulder pad, which now had a wet handprint on it. He didn’t reply. Just glanced at me condescendingly, then looked away. Then he did a double take to reexamine my neck. I must have pressed the elevator call button twenty times before we finally got a ding!
On my way up to Pasha’s fifteenth-floor office, I tried to organize my defense. Clearly, I had done something to anger him. The question was: what?
It could have been lots of things. We had recently been informed that the Danish guard the Iraqis wanted to throw in jail had escaped. He had done so exactly as we had planned. His Danish colleagues from Iraqi Kurdistan had driven down to Baghdad under the pretext that they were about to go on vacation, and in the middle of the night they had rolled him up in a carpet and loaded him into their trunk. After hiding their rolled-up pal in a hole they had carved out under the back seat of their SUV, they drove north, got past the military checkpoints without getting searched, and dropped their friend off in Turkey before anybody noticed he was gone.
Did Pasha find out I had been in on this plan? Who could possibly have told him? No, it had to be something else.…
Then it hit me. A few days ago, a Swiss magistrate had written to us revealing that a company doing business under the Oil-for-Food program was in fact a front (a legal entity set up for the sole purpose of doing a particular transaction while shielding the people behind the deal). Whoever sets up a front company wants to make sure the public will never be aware of their business. In his fax, the Swiss magistrate had asked us if it was legal, under the UN guidelines, to disguise the origins of the companies exporting goods to Iraq using ghost fronts.
It was a simple question, but somehow nobody could give me a straight answer, and the UN’s Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) did not respond to my requests for advice. How was I to write a reply for Pasha to send to the Swiss magistrate? I decided to dive into the complex regulations governing the Oil-for-Food operation in search of an answer. Not surprisingly, I found it was absolutely illegal for a company to use fronts to export goods to Iraq, especially if these shell structures were not based in the country where the company operated. With that, I drafted a reply and sent it to OLA for clearance before I would submit it to Pasha for signature.
“Don’t open that can of worms!” came the e-mail reply from one colleague.
Vladimir Golytsin, the Russian lawyer assigned to Oil-for-Food issues, agreed. He argued that the best course of action was not to reply at all. According to him, the Swiss magistrate had no business addressing such a query to the UN. Golytsin even suggested that the Swiss magistrate had political motives for his query.
Political motives? I thought the Swiss were the neutral guys. It sounded like I needed to consult Spooky.
“This is very serious stuff, Michael,” said Spooky. “This should be handled at the highest level! The secretary general should be informed immediately!”
“Why, what’s the big deal?” I asked. “This Swiss guy is asking us what our rules say, and I’m telling him what the rules say. Why does this have to get complicated?” I was getting increasingly confused.
“Because this is the first time we’ve been officially notified of this phenomenon,” said Spooky.
“What phenomenon?” I asked.
“The Iraqis are using front companies in order to get kickbacks,” said Spooky.
“How does that work?”
“Well, it’s pretty simple,” said Spooky. “The Iraqi Health Ministry will sign a contract with Company A to import medicines.”
“Right.…”
“But Company A is not a pharmaceutical company.”
“Then what is it?”
“Company A is, say, a Jordanian friend of the Iraqi health minister.”
“OK.…”
“So Company A buys medicines from Company B, a real pharmaceutical company, then sells the goods to Iraq at inflated prices, yields a profit, and splits the money with the Iraqi minister.”
“Holy shit!”
“Yes. I knew this was going on,” said Spooky, “but now we have something tangible to work with. An official letter from the Swiss authorities.”
“OK,” I said, “but here’s the problem. Legal Affairs won’t sign off on my draft, and Pasha won’t sign the letter unless Legal signs off on it. So we’re stuck!”
Spooky nodded his head in quiet frustration. He had obviously been aware of this problem for quite some time, and I felt mounting resentment that he had not let me in on this issue. Why did I have to stumble on it like that? I thought he and I had a deal to keep each other in the loop!
Trevor knew as well as I did that our fundamental mandate required us to report any diversions of cash from the humanitarian program. Trevor was not one to dissuade me from that. He had briefed me on this aspect of our mission from the very beginning and had put his career at risk several times in the past by pushing for exactly this kind of reporting. Only he had been ignored. And his scheduled promotion had been delayed more than once. Trevor had to pick his battles, and from the look on his face, this had not come at an opportune time.
He looked at me apologetically. I nodded my acceptance. But what were we to do now? Trevor’s eyes converged on a fixed point above my head; he took a deep breath and made a decision.
“I’ll call Pasha right now,” said Trevor, picking up his phone.
A few seconds later, Trevor had Pasha on the line. “Yes… it’s… ha, ha, ha… yes, sir!… yes… I’m sorry?… aha… well, sir, it’s about the issue with the Swiss magistrate… right… but it’s rather important, because you see… yes… but, sir… yes… yes… right… bye-bye now.”
Spooky, as Pasha had no doubt called him, hung up with a desperate look on his face.
“He never listens to me anymore,” he said.
Had Trevor been “defanged,” as Pasha had promised the Iraqi foreign minister he might be? The thought crossed my mind, but I had no time to deconstruct Pasha’s pattern of behavior toward his chief analyst.
It was beginning to look like the Swiss magistrate was not going to get a reply. If Pasha didn’t take Spooky’s advice on this one, it meant he was in no mood to make a fuss. We would hide behind procedure, which allowed us not to answer questions unless they came directly from a government, through official channels. In other words, the Swiss magistrate would be asked to direct his question toward his own government, which, at the time, was not a member of the UN (Switzerland joined the UN in 2002).
In essence, we would be telling the Swiss magistrate to “get lost” in polite UN-speak. And it would be my job to do so.
I went back to my office and shot an angry e-mail off to the lawyers at OLA, pointing out that many days had now gone by and we needed a clear answer from them.
“IS THE USE OF FRONT COMPANIES LEGAL OR ILLEGAL?” I asked, in all caps. The Russian lawyer I was speaking to had about seven grades of seniority over me and didn’t appreciate being addressed in caps. So he simply didn’t reply.
I didn’t expect I would be reading a printout of this e-mail exchange while under questioning years later. But I would never regret putting my question to the UN’s lawyer in caps. It was a simple yet fundamental question that had a yes or no answer. If my superiors could not get themselves to answer it, I thought, I might as well do this myself. I decided simply to pick up the phone and call the Swiss magistrate directly. I dialed and reached some kind of legal aide, to whom I explained the answer to the magistrate’s question. The use of front companies was illegal, but I couldn’t get my boss to put it on paper. Why not? Because, um, we had protocol issues, and they would probably get a letter explaining that. But in any case, the answer was already on paper, so to speak, since it was written into the UN resolution documents that made up our mandate, and these documents were public—even available on the web.
“Oh, and don’t quote me,” I added.
My interlocutor was somewhat puzzled that a UN official would worry about getting on record to confirm the UN’s own publicly available laws. But he was nice enough not to insist.
I had answered the query in Pasha’s place, sidetracked the UN Office of Legal Affairs, and communicated with an “outside entity” about a subject that Spooky himself thought should be handled at “the highest level.” I had broken the chain of command.
I did this for two very contradictory reasons. The first was related to my conscience; the second, to my sense of loyalty. On the one hand, I would have hated myself if a Swiss court case concluded that the UN was uncooperative in answering a simple, straightforward question. On the other hand, I sensed that Pasha would be perfectly glad to avoid expressing himself on this issue, so as to maintain plausible deniability.
But offering a superior the option of deniability also means taking the fall if things go wrong. As I racked my brain trying to figure out why an angry Pasha had suddenly called me to his office that morning, the Swiss episode ranked number one on my list of possibilities. The nightmare scenario quickly took shape in my mind. Surely, the Swiss magistrate must have initiated some kind of probe, and now it was all coming back to bite me in the ass before the UN even had time to send an official reply. The UN Security Council would take up the matter, the United States would go bonkers, and the whole program would grind to a halt—all because of me!
When I reached Pasha’s office, I bit my lip before knocking on his door.
“Yes!”
I opened the door and stayed at the entrance instead of walking in. Pasha was shaking his head. Uh-oh, here it comes.…
“You’re dressed like a clown!” said Pasha.
He had a point. I had chosen my shirt based not on how well it matched my suit but on how high the collar was—hoping it would help conceal my hickey. It was yellow, and the left tip of the collar kept flapping upward because it lacked that little piece of plastic that would have kept it straight. I wore it with a blue tie, which would have been fine with a blue suit. But my blue suit was at the dry cleaners, and as I had been running late after my night of debauchery with the chemically imbalanced vampire girl, I had thrown on a thick gray suit I purchased back when I was fifteen pounds fatter.
Pasha’s taste in clothes was really impeccable, and it visibly pained him to see me looking like a clown. He got up, walked toward me, and snapped my collar back down before proceeding to adjust my tie.
“Let’s go! And get yourself a new suit. I can’t take you to the thirty-eighth floor looking like this!”
“The… the thirty-eighth floor?”
We were going to Kofi Annan’s office. Oh, God.… I walked with my head tilted slightly to the left, in an attempt to hide the mark on my neck. But in the elevator ride up, Pasha noticed it.
“What the fack is this?” he asked, pressing his finger into my neck.
“Aw!… I don’t know,” I answered.
“Who did you fack?”
“Well, I… erm… you don’t know her.”
“Tsk… tsk… tsk…” Pasha shook his head, then added, “You should have put some powder on it!”
I nodded, feeling truly idiotic.
It was my first time setting foot on the thirty-eighth floor. An eerie silence prevailed there. People moved stiffly and spoke in hushed tones. Well, except for Pasha, who slapped people on the shoulder and called them “fackers.”
How many UN secretary generals had Pasha worked for? He had joined the organization before I was born, in 1965. He was part of the building, and even Kofi Annan’s aides appeared a little scared of him.
The top floor of the UN building is a rather impractical location for the secretary general’s office. If the UN were a ship (which is how it looks from the angle that journalists often pick as background to their stand-ups), the secretary general’s office would be all the way up in the mast. The building is so flat that the wind actually causes it to bend, as evidenced by the subtle creaking sounds that permeate the structure on stormy days.
The security guard saluted Pasha with extra stiffness. As UN security coordinator, my boss was also this man’s boss. We proceeded to take a left, walking down the corridor to Kofi Annan’s office. We arrived before the desk of Elisabeth Lindenmayer, Annan’s executive assistant (and his former French teacher), who lit up on command as we approached. I assumed she always did this with visitors coming to see her boss, but I didn’t expect that she would start grilling me with questions as we waited for Annan to be disposed. She seemed like a very charming and intelligent lady, but I was a bit confused by her line of questioning. I felt like she was profiling me. And it got pretty intimate, too, when she started asking me where I was from, where I had studied, and why I had a French-sounding name if I was from Denmark.
Pasha wagged his finger at her and said, “Don’t steal this one from me. He’s not trained yet!” For the first time that morning, I began to entertain the possibility that I might not be in trouble after all. Lindenmayer smiled at Pasha but was no less curious about my background. Younger staffers were so rare that we became a valuable commodity. The zeal and the energy of an upstart could do wonders for bureaucrats who knew how to steer them, and the UN’s recruitment system was so averse to hiring anybody who didn’t already have years of experience at the UN that when younger staff made their way in, usually through some sort of glitch in the UN’s recruitment matrix, they were soon fought over by senior managers. Lindenmayer obviously had her pick, since she was sitting on the thirty-eighth floor, so it was rather flattering that she would take any interest in my profile at all. But my answers must have sounded a bit confused, because, well, I was a bit confused. I still didn’t know what I was doing up here, and I still worried that the front-company snafu might be about to blow up in my face in a most high-profile manner.
I was about to explain the roots of my last name to Lindenmayer when I saw Nizar Hamdoon, the Iraqi ambassador, walking up the corridor toward us with a delegation of aides. What were they doing here?
This was definitely not a good time for me to explain that my last name was Hebrew in origin. The name Soussan traces its roots to the town of Shushan, in ancient Babylon (present-day Iran), and is first mentioned in the Book of Esther, in the Old Testament. My father was born in French Morocco, hence the Francophone sound of the name. He had met my Danish Protestant mother in Israel in the 1960s, when it was popular for Northern European hippies to spend summers at kibbutzes, and the result was a child who could best be described as a Sephardic Viking. In Iraqi, the equivalent to Soussan would be Sassoon. Yes, like the shampoo. But to most Iraqis, the association would be with the Jewish religion rather than with Vidal’s hair products. I knew the Iraqis had refused to give visas to other staff with Jewish names in the past, so I wasn’t eager to complicate matters right then by satisfying Lindenmayer’s curiosity.
“What’s going on? Why’s the Iraqi ambassador here?” I asked Pasha, untactfully ignoring Lindenmayer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re the ones who called for this meeting. The SG just told me this morning.”
“So we don’t know what this is about?”
Pasha shook his head. I thought about bringing him up to date on the “can of worms” issue he had asked me to handle, but it was too late. The Iraqis had arrived at our level. After shaking their hands, we all just stood there, as for a moment of silence, occasionally interrupted by an uncomfortable cough.
I caught Ambassador Hamdoon looking at me and shifted position. The man had the strangest curly eyebrows. He looked like a cartoonist’s depiction of a vizier; in my previous capacity as a news assistant for CNN, I had ambushed him on several occasions with provocative questions as he walked toward the UN Security Council.
Finally, the door to Annan’s office opened, and we were all invited to step inside. His office was sober and immaculate. The mounds of paper that seemed to fill up every corner of the UN building were absent here. The Iraqis sat on the couch, and I found a chair where I sat down and prepared to write up the official notes of the meeting.
I was struck by the fact that the man who always appeared so calm and relaxed when I saw him on TV was actually neither calm nor relaxed. Kofi Annan was controlled, to be sure, but right beneath the surface of his persona I sensed a bubble of nervous energy waiting to burst. His handshake was warm, and the tone of his voice exuded confidence, alertness, and caution. There was a rumor that the man had never lost his temper, ever. Only one person could recollect a time when he nearly lost it, and that was Lindenmayer, now sitting outside. She confided to Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker that Annan had gotten angry once, back in the 1980s, when he was running the UN’s human resources. Apparently, he lost his cool at the corrupt way the member states were running the appointment and promotion committee.
“If somebody does not get angry often and suddenly gets very angry, I can tell you it’s very powerful,” she had told Gourevitch. “He was like a lion roaring, he was so angry at them.… I tell you, he’s angry with his whole body—with his eyes. His anger comes from every single part of him. His voice goes down. It takes a register, like an organ, which is the lowest one. It’s very, very frightening when he gets angry.”
My colleagues and I would eventually come to wish that Kofi Annan would get angry more often, either with Saddam Hussein or with the United States (depending on our politics), but it was simply not in his nature. At best, he would flicker his eyes, which was his way of expressing extreme irritation. His eyes seemed able to take in every aspect of the situation at once. Unlike Pasha’s, they wouldn’t roam around the room, picking up every detail. His gaze was steady, purposefully directed, and unafraid of contact. He addressed people with a humility that immediately put them at ease.
Annan was a likable man. Even the UN’s worst enemy on Capitol Hill, Jesse Helms, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, once admitted to the secretary general that he had taken an extensive look at Annan’s background and had not found a single person who disliked him. This was not necessarily meant as a compliment, of course, but there was no question that Annan made a positive impression on the people who met him. An anecdote from his younger days as a student in the United States has it that he once walked into a barbershop and was told by the shop’s white owner, “We don’t cut niggers’ hair.”
Instead of getting angry or simply leaving, Annan replied, “I’m not a nigger, I’m an African.”
And the barber said, “Come on, siddown,” and proceeded to give him a haircut.
Kofi Annan was more than just a diplomat. He was a black man who was able (and willing) to get a haircut from a white supremacist barber. He did have his detractors within the system, but one could sense a certain jealousy in their criticism. Pasha had been extremely friendly with Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Coptic Christian from Egypt who managed to become intensely disliked by the Clinton administration. Word had it that Boutros-Ghali saw Annan as a possible successor (and hence a threat) early on, and that this guided his decision to send him to Bosnia, as the failed UN mission there was being taken over by NATO troops. Against all logic, Bosnia proved to be a springboard for Kofi Annan. The U.S. military and diplomatic corps there instantly took a liking to him and put in a good word for the man when it became evident that the United States would not renew Boutros-Ghali’s term.
Kofi Annan was the first nominee for the post of secretary general to come from Sub-Saharan Africa and the first to emerge from within the ranks of the UN Secretariat. He had joined the UN system in 1962, after completing his studies at Macalester College, a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, which he traveled to from his native Ghana on a Ford Foundation grant. At twenty-four, he was unusually young when he got his first UN job with the World Health Organization in Geneva. Like many younger staff, he reportedly predicted that his stint with the UN would be brief: “two years, then I’m out.” I had told myself exactly the same thing when I was recruited, at the same age, the previous year. But that morning, as I waited anxiously to hear what the Iraqis had come to say, I prayed that it wouldn’t involve any Swiss magistrates. I didn’t want to lose this job. In barely a year, my responsibilities had grown exponentially. I had become personally invested in this operation’s future.
Unfortunately, the waters for which we were headed were not navigable—not by Kofi Annan or by anyone else. Slowly but surely, the warning signs would accumulate. But much like the incident that was causing me so much anxiety that morning, they would not be acted on. Saddam Hussein was testing the system to see how much fraud he could get away with. The use of front companies had not yet become systematic. We could have nipped this scheme in the bud, but it would have required a number of communications that never took place. The Office of Legal Affairs would have needed to clearly state our own rules. Pasha would have needed to inform Annan of the emerging phenomenon. And Annan would have needed to tell the Iraqi ambassador that we were prepared to go public if the practice didn’t stop.
As it stood, I didn’t even know if Pasha had briefed Annan on the problem. He would eventually have to, I assumed. But perhaps not quite yet. Surely, the Iraqis were not about to bring up the issue.
As the meeting began, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Clearly, neither side was interested in the Swiss magistrate’s letter. It would be years before I realized that this should have been a cause for concern, not relief. If the UN was not addressing issues of compliance with international law as they related to billions of dollars under its control, then what, if anything, were we doing to exercise “oversight” over this operation?
Well, I suppose we were just trying to keep our jobs, and if anything had become clear to me that morning, it was that doing so involved taking the minimum possible amount of risk.
This would help explain why issues of compliance by the Iraqi regime would be methodically ignored. Merely confirming our own rules to an outside entity had been a complicated affair for us, and the simple fact that I finally decided to act on my own had caused me to fear for my job that morning. Would I take such risks again?
To be sure, with the massive growth of the operation, there would be plenty of occasions to make such calls. Especially in light of what the Iraqis were now telling us.
The Iraqi ambassador had come to complain that his government was unhappy with our proposal to increase the size of the Oil-for-Food program. They wanted an increase, all right, just not of the kind that we had proposed. The humanitarian projects we had presented to the Security Council as part of our pitch to increase the operation were not to their liking. They were, in essence, too humanitarian and did not involve enough industrial projects. The Iraqis did not want to buy as much food and medicine as we had recommended. They wanted more trucks, telecom equipment, and industrial machinery. And they would send a team from Baghdad to New York to negotiate with us on that basis. Only then would they agree to the expanded Oil-for-Food scheme.
Having made his key demand, the ambassador gauged Annan’s and Pasha’s reactions. Rather than make a commitment, my bosses pledged they would take Iraq’s request under consideration. The meeting was kept short. Tensions on the weapons of mass destruction front were still at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Iraq’s economic future took second place to that conflict.
The Iraqi ambassador had some nerve to criticize us for the way we had handled the expansion of the program. It almost seemed like we, at the UN, were more worried than Saddam Hussein himself about the welfare of the Iraqi people. It almost felt like we were begging him to let us help his country. And now we would have to negotiate down from the terms we had proposed to the Security Council.
Saddam and his cronies were happy to organize parade burials through Baghdad once every couple of months, with little wooden coffins that supposedly contained “children killed by the sanctions,” but when it came to actually saving these malnourished kids, there was nobody home. Spooky had fought tooth and nail to make sure the Iraqi government purchased special food for the most malnourished kids. It took them nine months to comply, and they did so only after Spooky threatened to go public with the issue and harm their propaganda campaign.
The fact that Spooky’s threat produced a result was proof to me that the Iraqis could in fact be influenced. I would always remain uncertain of what exactly would have happened if we had gone public with the information that Saddam was defrauding the UN humanitarian program as we received it. But here is what would not have happened. The UN would never have stood accused of turning a blind eye to Saddam’s multibillion-dollar rip-off or of lying to the public when asked about it. And I would certainly not have ended up sitting in this cold little conference room, being interrogated by a team of international investigators, about an e-mail I had long since forgotten, in which a colleague counseled me not to open “that can of worms.”
As I sat there being questioned by the Volcker inquiry panel seven years after the start of my UN employment, I could perfectly understand why my interrogator would be frustrated. Especially now that she had this e-mail exchange proving that we knew about Saddam’s massive fraud from the very beginning.
“So what happened after this e-mail exchange?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I mean nothing happened. We simply didn’t follow up on it. We dropped the ball.”
The investigator looked at me strangely, as if it was inconceivable that such an issue would simply vanish from our radar screen. At that point, I recognized the challenge facing the investigators. They were probing a case of massive fraud, yet they were totally unfamiliar with the managerial culture that prevailed within the United Nations. Some kind of guidebook might have helped them, but official papers, even our e-mails, did not contain the most important rules of all: the UN-written rules.