“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”
MOLIÈRE
“Um…” said my intern, popping her head into my office and sounding more worried than usual.
“Yes?” I said, as I continued to type away at my computer.
“There’s a priest here to see you,” she said.
“A priest?”
“Yeah. I mean, he’s dressed as a priest. And it’s not Halloween, so.…”
“What does he want?”
“I think he wants you to lift the sanctions or something.”
“Oh. Well, send him in.”
It had recently occurred to Pasha that we needed some kind of spokesman for the program, and since recruiting one would take several months, he had appointed me to the task. This meant constant interruptions from journalists, academics, businessmen, and various sorts of activists. So why not a priest?
A few seconds later, a man with a long black gown and a thick gold pendant took a seat across from my desk. He turned down my offer of a coffee with a wise wave of the hand. The devoted smile on his face was not necessarily friendly. And his black, deep-set eyes had a shine that scared me a little bit.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“It is not I who needs help,” said the priest. “It is the children of Iraq.”
“Right.… Of course.”
The priest had come prepared with explicit photographs of children lying wounded in hospitals and a stack of literature detailing horror stories “caused by the sanctions.”
“Do you realize what is happening down there?” asked the priest.
“I have some idea, yes.”
“The sanctions are killing children, infants, old women.… Do you people have no heart?”
“We are working to make things better,” I said, adding that we had just massively increased the amount of humanitarian goods that could flow into the country. But the priest just shook his head. He took me through some of the pamphlets he had brought with him and encouraged me to view a videotape a group of activists had shot while on a visit to Iraq.
“Your so-called humanitarian program is just a tool to perpetuate the sanctions,” he said. In his view, children would continue to die needlessly until the sanctions on Saddam Hussein were lifted altogether. And until then, UN employees like myself would have the children’s deaths “on their conscience.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s not in my power to lift the sanctions. I appreciate you coming here and sharing these documents with me. But if you want to lobby for lifting the sanctions, you need to speak to the U.S. or the U.K.…”
The priest shook his head for a moment longer, then said, “I will pray for your soul.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You can save your prayers for the Iraqi children. I’m sure they need them more than I do.”
“I will pray for you nonetheless.”
He rose, and I stood up to escort him out. As we walked to the elevators, we ran into Spooky in the corridor. Spooky was a devout Anglican, whose first act upon moving to New York had been to set up a shelter for homeless people at his local church. So I thought I’d introduce him to the Catholic priest, to see if two men of deep faith might come to some agreement regarding the dilemma that was facing our collective conscience. But it turned out the two had already met and did not wish to speak to each other again. This was made evident, despite their forced politeness, by the spark of static electricity that hit them both when they came in physical contact.
Dzit!
They both jolted; then, realizing nothing grave had happened, tried to regain composure. We had recently gotten new carpets, and there was static everywhere. Our office had become rather stylish, and we were now proud to receive visitors from the outside world. The iron desks were gone. The secretaries had comfortable booths with blue partition walls, and the electrical wires were tucked safely into discreet rubber conduits that spanned the entire office. The UN, which was normally strapped for cash, had gone on an interior design extravaganza using Iraqi oil money. Since the expansion of the program, we had become the richest operation at the United Nations. We were authorized to spend 2.2 percent of Iraq’s oil proceeds, which added up to a total of $1 billion over the course of the program. That was as much as the accumulated dues the United States refused to pay during the Jesse Helms years. In addition, we spent 13 percent of Iraq’s revenues through the UN agencies that were responsible for buying goods for Iraqi Kurdistan. This would come to $6 billion ($2 billion more than the entire sum pledged by world nations to provide relief for Asian countries devastated by the tsunami of 2004).
No country on earth had ever paid as high a share of its national wealth to the UN budget as Iraq was doing, and it was far more than we could reasonably spend. So even with all the renovations, there was usually money left over at the end of every budget cycle (as an acting spokesperson, I was quick to point out that the UN poured any leftover funds back into the humanitarian accounts).
After sending the priest off to lobby the U.S. Embassy, I joined Spooky in his office for a cigarette. I resented having a cleric come into my office and accuse me of being a baby killer when all I was doing all day long was trying to help make a humanitarian program work.
“It’s getting worse,” said Spooky, handing me an article. “Denis Halliday is now going on a tour.”
“A tour?”
“He’s speaking all around England and in colleges in the United States. He’s accusing the United Nations of committing genocide in Iraq.”
“You’re kidding.”
After resigning in a hail of glory, Halliday was spending his retirement as an anti-sanctions activist. I had to respect his decision. The guy stood up for his beliefs. But it didn’t feel so great to be accused of participating in a genocide. I hadn’t joined the UN to commit murder.
During the years when the sanctions had done the most damage to Iraq’s civilians (1991 to 1997), few groups had raised their voice to protest what was going on. Ironically, now that the UN was doing something about the situation, anti-sanctions groups were sprouting up all over the world. They ranged from honest, well-meaning, and well-informed organizations such as the Cambridge University student group CASI (Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq) to far more extreme groups that didn’t seem even mildly concerned by Saddam Hussein’s massive crimes against his people and that were bent on portraying us as assassins.
The priest who had visited me was associated with a group called Voices in the Wilderness, which staged vivid demonstrations around the world insisting that Saddam should be free to import whatever he wanted. They saw this as the only solution to Iraq’s humanitarian crisis. The fact that Saddam did not want to spend as much money on food and medicine as we had recommended did not temper these activists’ zeal.
“There’s something I don’t get, Trevor. The more money flows into this program, the more activist groups sprout up. It’s not logical!”
“Of course it’s logical,” said Spooky.
“How so?”
“Just follow the money.…” Spooky liked to let his most intriguing statements hang in the air and watch me try to make sense of them. “Look at who funds them,” he finally added.
Well, I didn’t have time to do that. I had Reuters calling me about the price of crude oil for next month, a briefing note for Kofi Annan to write up, a weekly press release to send out, and my director’s office to manage. Besides, the anti-sanctions activists were not exactly listing the sources of their funding on their websites. Some of them surely had legitimate sources of funding. But how much “grassroots” support money could be raised for this cause by throwing keg parties at campuses? Some groups managed to travel all over the Middle East, put up elaborate websites, and produce a range of documentaries and other media materials. Where was this money coming from?
Years later, it would take sixty international investigators nineteen months to unravel the extensive network of support groups Saddam Hussein was able to set up around the world, using the very same resources we were trying to make available to the Iraqi people.
The story of one priest, Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, certainly shed some light on the question that was preoccupying me that morning. From 1991 to 1994, Father Benjamin worked as an assistant to the Vatican state secretary, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. In 1997, just as the Oil-for-Food program was getting started, Father Benjamin began to campaign against the sanctions. During his visit to Iraq in 1998, he became friendly with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, the sole Christian member of Saddam’s cabinet. (Deputy prime minister was a somewhat misleading title for the man whose principal task was to lead Iraq’s propaganda war effort.) At the time, Father Benjamin was producing a documentary called Iraq: The Birth of Time, which would probably have become a box-office smash hit had the birth of time been traced to 1932, the year a piece of Mesopotamia was carved out of the Ottoman Empire and slapped with the name Iraq.
In 1999, Father Benjamin founded the Benjamin Committee for Iraq. Political campaigning was rather new for a man who had spent most of his extracurricular activities to date composing music and writing lyrical books. Father Benjamin was also a performer, playing the piano, the guitar, and on occasion the electronic keyboards, making spectacular, though brief, forays into the glam world of religious disco.
In April 2000, the flamboyant Father Benjamin decided to risk his life for the Iraqi people by becoming a passenger on an unauthorized (but highly publicized) flight from Rome to Baghdad that purposefully defied the UN embargo. Anti-sanctions activists were multiplying these kinds of publicity stunts even though Iraqi ministers complained in private that they didn’t quite know what to do with much of the random supplies these activists brought with them to “save Iraqi lives,” since they didn’t fit into the normal distribution chain and, again, because Iraq was already receiving more humanitarian goods than Saddam cared to spend money on. In some cases, highly publicized humanitarian flights came in with expired medicine.
But the do-gooders were quite impressed with themselves nonetheless. In 2001 Tariq Aziz expressed his appreciation for Father Benjamin’s “prodigious efforts to establish the principles of justice and right.” Benjamin even made a public declaration that he had “the Pope’s blessing” for going on this trip to Iraq. Did he really? One thing is certain. No man of morals would have blessed what happened next.
Meet Alain Bionda, a businessman representing companies seeking to break into the Iraqi crude oil market. After trying several times to approach the Iraqi oil minister to get a contract, Bionda was informed that in order to do business with Iraq, he had to find a man who would introduce him to Tariq Aziz. Bionda looked and looked but found nobody who could make the introduction. But then one night, an Iraqi friend of Bionda’s (who requested anonymity when he later testified to investigators) had an idea. He told Bionda that he had once met a priest named Father Benjamin, who in turn had met with Aziz several times and seemed, well, friendly to the government.
At that point, Bionda could have asked his friend, “What are the chances that a priest would intervene on behalf of an oil trader like myself?” But he didn’t. Something told him that his luck was about to turn with Father Benjamin, and so he asked his anonymous friend to arrange for a meeting with the ordained priest.
It wouldn’t be long before the two men concocted a plan to make some cash off the Oil-for-Food program. Father Benjamin thought that the most proper way to proceed would be to involve Pope Jean Paul II himself in their scheme. In 2001 Father Benjamin asked Bionda to deliver a letter from the Pope to Aziz, the idea being that if Bionda came highly recommended, with a letter from the Pope, Aziz might be impressed. One has to hope that Pope Jean Paul II didn’t actually write this letter himself, or at least that he did not know what use Father Benjamin and his new business partner would have for it. Either way, Bionda felt anxious going to Iraq alone with a letter from the Pope. After all, he was an oil trader, not a courier for the Vatican. So he asked Father Benjamin to accompany him to see Aziz. The priest would hand over the letter from the Pope, and, as the investigation later revealed, Bionda would “solicit Mr. Aziz for an oil allocation.” All in one fell swoop.
When this odd couple appeared before Tariq Aziz in 2001, with their letter from the Pope and their demand for underpriced Iraqi oil, they tried as best they could not to make it look as if they had any business relationship with each other. So when it came time for Bionda to request an oil allocation, Father Benjamin might well have been examining his nails.
Aziz’s eyes had a certain Garfield quality to them, especially when he became suspicious of his interlocutors. They’d slide back and forth under half-closed eyelids even as he remained politely silent. Did these jokers think he was born yesterday? Clearly, as far as Aziz was concerned, the two men were in business, and that was how the transaction would be recorded in Iraq’s Oil Ministry records.
Following the meeting among Aziz, Bionda, and Father Benjamin, an allocation of two million barrels of oil was granted in Father Benjamin’s name and sold to Bionda. Years later, in 2005, Father Benjamin and Bionda would both vehemently deny to investigators that the priest expected anything in return for facilitating this transaction. But investigators found that after he cashed in on his Iraqi oil deal, Bionda transferred $140,000 to Father Benjamin’s account at UBS Geneva on December 27, 2001. In defending his action, Bionda explained that he felt a “moral obligation” to pay the priest for his help. The same day, Father Benjamin transferred $90,000 to another account he held at the Vatican Bank; and from that account, he withdrew $20,150 in cash.
I wonder how Father Benjamin felt about himself as he walked around the streets of Rome with twenty grand in his pockets. His cash had been ripped off the humanitarian program illegally, and he understood this. His total commission of $140,000 could buy a lot of Tylenol for Iraq’s ailing inpatients. And maybe, just maybe, such a thought eventually occurred to him, because further evidence shows that he may actually have felt some remorse. In January 2002, when he was offered an additional oil allocation to support “his activities in favor of the Iraqi population,” Father Benjamin told Aziz, both in person and by letter, that he could not accept any more oil. Investigators found that Oil Ministry records confirmed this new pious stance. Further allocations were made to Father Benjamin for 5.5 million barrels, but the priest never made use of them. His friend Bionda, however, continued his lucrative trade right up to the start of the Iraq War in 2003, graciously accepting the allocation that had been given to Father Benjamin. And no evidence emerged that he continued to feel a “moral obligation” to pay his holy friend further commissions.
After the invasion of Iraq, Father Benjamin sent an “open letter” to his friend Tariq Aziz, who now sat in jail in Baghdad. In his letter (which is very long but very entertaining, and is available at Father Benjamin’s website at www.benjaminforiraq.org), the priest recalled “a time when everyone wanted to see” the talented Mr. Aziz.
From all over the world, politicians, figures from the worlds of science, of culture, of the arts and of the media, leaders of political parties, of associations and others wanted to see you. [Oddly, he doesn’t mention oil traders.] Since your arrest, many of them have not spoken a word to defend you, but there remain many others who are ready to do so. The witnesses for your defense will not only be lawyers, but also high-ranking political figures, even several Ministers currently in power, ambassadors, Nobel prize winners, artists, doctors, men of religion, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and of other faiths, as well as writers and journalists.
Aziz could read the priest’s plea between the lines of purple prose: please don’t rat us out, and we’ll come to your aid! But Aziz would talk to investigators, all right. And talk. And talk. And all the influential people Father Benjamin was referring to in his letter would be unable to come to his aid, because they would come under investigation themselves.
Not everyone investigated was guilty, for example, in the late 1990s, George Galloway became an outspoken critic of the sanctions in the British Parliament. But he did more than just follow a fashionable trend. He actually decided to help one very cute little Iraqi child. In 1998 Galloway became chairman of the Mariam Appeal, an organization established with the honorable intention of providing medical treatment to Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old girl who suffered from leukemia, just like the girl we had met at the Baghdad hospital who ended up dying on Christmas Day.
Galloway’s organization helped little Mariam by financing a trip for her to a London Hospital, where she received treatment that was unavailable in Iraq. But her treatment cost just a fraction of the money that was raised. The Mariam Appeal used the rest of the money for a much broader political campaign against the sanctions in Iraq. It funded a fancy ten-country bus tour on a London double-decker, which Galloway used as a pro-Iraq publicity stunt. A film was made of this epic voyage. Here’s a flier invitation to the film’s opening night:
LAUNCH OF THE MARIAM APPEAL BIG BEN TO BAGHDAD BUS FILM 16 NOVEMBER 2000
The Arab Club of Britain is hosting the premiere showing of the Mariam Appeal film “Big Ben to Baghdad”: the epic journey through three continents, ten countries and 15,000 miles from London to Baghdad in an antique double-decker London Routemaster bus.
The film will be shown at the Brunei Theatre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1 at 6.30 p.m. on Thursday, 16th November, 2000.
Admission free but donations are welcome
FOLLOWING THE PREMIERE, VHS COPIES OF THE 60-MINUTE FILM WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE SPECIAL PRICE OF £9.99!!
In all, Galloway’s foundation received more than £1 million in donations. One of the contributors, Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman, was found by investigators to have funneled money to the Appeal through a complex network of middlemen who profited illegally from Iraq’s oil sales.
According to investigators, Zureikat got four oil allocations from Saddam and subsequently deposited £448,000 into the Mariam Appeal foundation. Zureikat was also found to have paid kickbacks into Saddam’s bank account in Jordan.
Galloway described the evidence that linked him to Zureikat’s oil transactions as fabrications—a “cock and bull story,” he wrote in an e-mail to the independent inquiry that investigated his deeds. “I had nothing to do with any oil deals of Mr. Zureikat or anyone else,” he said.
Oh, well. At least a little girl got treatment. But how many more kids might have been assisted with the money that was kicked back to Saddam?
Denis Halliday’s resignation gave a jolt to the groups lobbying for a lifting of the sanctions. Suddenly, they felt they could achieve their goal. In reality, anti-sanctions activists stood zero chance of lifting the sanctions—which, by then, only really applied to military or “dual-use” hardware. Saddam clearly knew this. So long as he was in power, there would be no circumstance under which the sanctions could be fully lifted. But his propaganda war kept pressure on the United Nations and swayed a lot of honorable people to his cause. People like Denis Halliday were not corrupt. And hundreds of young activists who took time out of their schedules to demonstrate against us were not corrupt either. But ultimately, it came down to this: allowing Saddam Hussein to import new tanks was not the way to save Iraqi children.
Saddam’s corruption-fueled propaganda machine did manage something important for the Iraqi regime. It put UN workers like me on the defensive. Instead of keeping an eye on Saddam’s financial transactions, we spent our time trying to defend ourselves against the charge that we were “committing genocide in Iraq.”
Nobody at the United Nations dared to challenge Halliday’s statement that the United Nations, and specifically the United States, could “be blamed for crimes against humanity, including possibly genocide.” His resignation was not effective immediately. He took the time to do a few victory laps with his friends in the Iraqi regime before leaving the country. The thirty-eighth floor watched Halliday tear away at the UN’s reputation without saying a word.
Back when Halliday was on payroll, Pasha had tried to call him back to order, but Halliday treated Pasha’s faxes the same way Pasha had treated Halliday’s no-smoking signs. Then, on the day that his resignation (finally) took effect, Halliday received a flowery letter from Kofi Annan thanking him for his distinguished service to the United Nations and promising to ask for his assistance again in the future.
This left those among us who had not resigned a bit confused as to the nature of our mission. Were we supposed to resign, too? Or were we supposed to carry on with our “genocidal” program?
Annan chickened out when it came to defending our mission in public. And Pasha couldn’t articulate his words well enough to get on the air. I figured that before we could have a coherent public relations strategy, we needed to be clear, inside the UN, on where we stood. Either we were doing the right thing or we were doing the wrong thing and should all resign.
The appointment of Hans von Sponeck to replace Halliday had initially given me hope that we might, at a minimum, stop feeding Saddam’s propaganda effort against us. Von Sponeck came across as a disciplinarian. Our mission had to be restructured to monitor an increasing flow of oil and goods into Iraq. But the four-day war of 1998, and Pasha’s failure to get von Sponeck and his staff out of Baghdad in time, had left the operation deeply divided, once again. At the working level, employees from New York and Baghdad could sometimes manage to collaborate. But such teamwork had to occur under the radar.
Soon after Operation Desert Fox, during which Pasha hung up on von Sponeck, it became clear that the German would probably resign on the Cypriot. What I did not expect from von Sponeck was that he intended to go the same way as Halliday and accuse the UN of conducting a “criminal” policy in Iraq. The resignation of yet another high-level UN official, on February 14, 2000, would completely paralyze our operation once again. Hans von Sponeck announced his decision to resign several months before it would take effect, which essentially meant he remained in a position of management and authority even after his resignation “in protest” over the sanctions had been announced.
Normally, when someone resigns from his post in a foreign ministry, his resignation takes effect immediately, or within a few weeks at most. He does not remain on payroll for several months and use his position to undermine the entire mission while completely desisting from doing his job. Instead of allowing von Sponeck to stay at his post once his intention to resign had been blasted all over the media, Annan should have accepted his resignation, “effective immediately,” and replaced him with someone who was interested in managing the thousands of staff we had in Iraq and New York. Instead of taking action, the team around Annan looked on passively as the largest operation under his watch was coming apart at the seams.
At one stage, Pasha managed to recruit a competent spokesperson. John Mills was a former reporter for Australian television and radio, a real newsman, a writer, and a storyteller, who had successfully reconverted his career as a much-sought-after UN spokesperson. John had a beautiful wife who worked for UNICEF, great kids, and a healthy life outside the office—proof, which I sorely needed, that one could pursue an interesting UN career without completely losing one’s mind.
Mills arrived at the office like a breath of fresh air. He had all sorts of plans to improve our image. He immediately set out to design a website and a series of media statements that aimed to counter Saddam Hussein’s anti-UN propaganda. He made contact with every member of the UN press corps and went for briefings with every senior manager in the office before finally ending up at my doorstep, slightly off balance, asking me if I had time for lunch.
Pasha was refusing to sign the op-ed piece Mills had written for him, people were refusing to feed him information for his website, and the UN field mission in Baghdad had begun calling him a spy.
“Welcome on board,” I said.
We sat down at the cafeteria, and I drew him a map of the conflicts (ideological, bureaucratic, and personal) that permeated the operation.
“Shit, where have I landed?” Mills asked, suddenly all depressed.
We were back at square one. In the many months it took Hans von Sponeck to resign, Mills became very ill. He had passed out one day after lunch and had not been seen in the office since. I was not told what ailed him, but I realized it was serious when I was suddenly asked by Pasha to once again serve as the “acting spokesman” for the program.
This time, I had some actual training for the job. Working with John Mills had sharpened my pen, and though we never got to publish much of what we produced, at least we had material available when journalists came knocking on our door. I courted Barbara Crossette of the New York Times with graphics and data that showed the various improvements the Oil-for-Food program had brought about, but ultimately she didn’t run it. The story lacked that most essential ingredient that makes anything worth publishing: conflict. Unless we actually attacked Halliday or von Sponeck directly, and stirred up the debate that way, the newspeople weren’t interested.
Why didn’t we? I put the question to Pasha one night. “Why don’t you give an interview to CNN and attack von Sponeck? Call him a spokesman for Saddam!” Pasha said it would only make the controversy worse.
“If you want to last in this business,” he told me, “you have to fly under the radar.”
And unlike Halliday or von Sponeck, who opted to take early retirement and become freewheeling public figures, Pasha intended to last. He didn’t want to make waves. Going up against von Sponeck would make him unpopular with France and Russia. And he would wreck his increasingly smooth relationship with Baghdad. I sometimes wondered how Pasha managed to be the only guy in the whole system to stay on the good side of the Americans and the Iraqis at the same time. Even Annan couldn’t manage to do this; his statements would inevitably be interpreted as too close to one side in the conflict and offensive to the other, depending on the day. Pasha played a different game. He understood the true nature of politics, defined by Ambrose Bierce as a clash “of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.”
When the Americans or the Iraqis came to Pasha, it was not to talk politics. It was to talk business. The volume of money that went through our hands was such that a memo from Pasha could hold up billions of dollars. The only real threat to Pasha’s survival at the top of the UN food chain came from the thirty-eighth floor.
There were only so many under secretary general posts to go around. Several career bureaucrats were lurking in the shadows, waiting to be rewarded for their loyal services. And Pasha feared that any excuse would be good enough to designate him as “the weakest link” in the circle around Kofi Annan. He sure wasn’t liked up there, and he knew it. In fact, he suspected that the reason the thirty-eighth floor refused to rein in von Sponeck was that they enjoyed seeing Pasha’s operation undermined. If the controversy boiled over, it might give them an excuse to replace him. They wouldn’t even need to fire him. He had reached retirement age and was vulnerable to a smoother type of “coup.” So he knew better than to step into an open media squabble. He wouldn’t give them any excuse to screw him.
“It’s up to the thirty-eighth floor,” said Pasha. “If they don’t want to rein him in, it’s their problem. I don’t care.”
My problem was, I cared. I wanted us to be proud of what we were doing. I wanted to publicize it and have the media portray us as the good guys. I didn’t want to be associated with a massive failure. First, Halliday had accused us of genocide, and now von Sponeck was accusing us of criminal behavior. That got news.
Recent college grads who had come on board were wondering if they had come to work for an evil enterprise. The public’s perception of our work had been completely distorted. Protesters were walking around with signs that said, “UN = SS.” We, of all people, were now seen as responsible for the plight of Iraq’s population, even as we spent our days (and often our evenings and weekends) trying to improve it. The clerk at my gym kept trying to stop me on my way in to talk about “what the UN is doing to Iraq.” There had to be a missing piece in this puzzle. Was Kofi Annan even aware of how bad things were? I decided to find out. I had been told about a bright young guy working on the thirty-eighth floor—someone who had experience in Washington and had gone to Harvard. His name was Nader. I had been introduced to him through common friends, and I decided to invite him to lunch.
“So tell me something. Who’s really in charge here?” I asked him, rather bluntly, after we had spent about fifteen minutes sympathizing.
Nader lay down his fork. “How do you mean?”
“Well, come on. I mean, look at our operation. There’s no discipline imposed on anybody. People walk around claiming we’re responsible for a genocide! Does nobody on the thirty-eighth floor think that’s preoccupying?”
Nader nodded, searching for the right words.
I added, “I’m probably going to do something about this at some point. I don’t know what yet—maybe I’ll just leave this place, but not before I understand what’s going on. So that’s why I’m asking. Who’s in charge?”
Nader nodded for a few moments longer, then said, “Riza. Riza’s in charge.” Iqbal Riza was Kofi Annan’s chief of staff.
“Well, that’s good to know,” I said, “because from where I’m sitting, it looks like nobody’s in charge.”
“Trust me,” said Nader. “Nothing happens without Riza knowing about it or approving of it. I’ve seen him put people back in their place, and trust me, he’s capable of doing that.”
“So is it his decision to tolerate von Sponeck’s bullshit?”
Nader didn’t answer. You didn’t make it to the thirty-eighth floor by biting on this kind of bait.
“Or is it Kofi Annan’s decision? Maybe Kofi Annan doesn’t believe in the mission either.”
“I think he does,” said Nader. “It’s just hard for him to balance the politics of this. Between Russia and France on one side, the U.S. and the U.K. on the other.…”
“All he has to do is appoint competent people to the top posts. I mean, Pasha and von Sponeck don’t even speak to each other! They’re running the UN’s largest operation! Does Kofi Annan not realize the risk he is taking by ignoring this situation?”
“I’m only a junior staff, like you. I can’t, you know.…”
“I know. I just wanted to give someone on the thirty-eighth a piece of my mind before… well, whatever I decide to do.”
My meeting with Nader was interesting, in that it confirmed to me that the hand on the UN ship’s steering wheel was Iqbal Riza’s. This was the man who put officials on shortlists for high-level posts and decided on issues as petty as office space allocations within the UN. When the Oil-for-Food scandal eventually broke, Riza would order all his “chronological” files shredded and resign before the investigation could be completed—a smart move for a man who definitely knew a thing or two about flying under the radar. Discreet as a cat, he would show up at official cocktail parties and walk around without speaking to anyone in particular, just observing the crowd. When a staff member spotted him and happened to be of high enough rank to be able to walk up to him and say hello, their conversation rarely lasted very long. Riza wasn’t much of a talker. He was a good listener, but one rarely got a sense of what he was thinking or how he would act on given information, if at all. His service to Kofi Annan was loyal, but it was unclear how much of the information that got to Riza filtered through to the UN chief. It was some time after my lunch with Nader that the thirty-eighth floor made a move on the propaganda front. A memo came down.
Annan had come across an article arguing our program was having no impact whatsoever on Iraq’s humanitarian situation. It was flat-out wrong, and Annan made a handwritten note on the margin of the news clipping: “We should not let them win this propaganda war.”
Iqbal Riza sent a memo with the article attached, and much was made of the fact that the secretary general “himself” had taken pen to paper.
Well, the note landed on my desk, and the problem, of course, was that we had already lost this damn propaganda war. And we had lost it without a fight. We didn’t shoot back once. We just kept shooting ourselves in the foot and dodging bullets from our own, self-appointed leaders!
My intern had grown used to hearing me complain about our failure to wage the propaganda war, but there was something she didn’t quite understand.
“Michael,” she said one day, “you complain and you complain and you complain. But you are a spokesman.… Why don’t you say something?”
“Because I can’t!” I shot back. “Pasha wants to fly under the radar, and Kofi Annan doesn’t want to rein in von Sponeck!”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I could ask him that.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Why are you smiling?” she asked, earnestly confused.
“Because it’s a cute question. It doesn’t work like that.…”
“Don’t call me cute!”
“Not you… your question… agh!”
My intern was definitely not “cute.” She was drop-dead gorgeous. Castable in a James Bond movie. Her nickname was Turkish Delight, because she kept bringing delicious Turkish pastries to work and leaving them by the secretaries’ desk, thereby ensuring that they would grow fatter and that she would remain the slimmest woman in the office. Not that the secretaries ate all of them. Pasha soon became addicted, too. He would walk by after lunch and pick up a delicate little piece out of the box to take with him into the office. Twenty minutes later, he’d come out again to ask his secretary a question (which he would normally do through the speakerphone) and grab three more pieces. Later in the day, the entire box would lie in his garbage can, and there would be white sugar powder on the carpet next to his chair.
Now Turkish Delight had me on the defensive as I tried to explain why I couldn’t simply ask Kofi Annan to rein in von Sponeck.
“You know, I’m not that important in this place. I can’t just pick up my phone and call Kofi Annan. There’s a difference between being a full-fledged spokesman and just being an acting spokesman. I can’t take crazy initiatives like attacking another senior official or, you know.…”
Turkish Delight was nodding, so I figured she had gotten the point.
“So, like, you see what I mean.…”
“Yes,” said Turkish Delight. “You are acting spokesman but you are afraid to act like a spokesman.”