When I walked into the office the next day, my colleagues were looking at me strangely—almost as if they were afraid to speak to me. I detected a nervous smile on several people’s faces. I had upset the normal order of things by throwing the gauntlet at an assistant secretary general.
In doing so, I had leaned on the laws enacted by the UN Security Council. The assumption, of course, was that the Council was interested in enforcing its own laws, and that the institution hence carried inherent legitimacy as the central recourse in matters of international peace and security. The third act of our collective misadventure would prove this assumption tragically wrong. But in the meantime, it offered me cover to let out some steam and try to re-energize our operation.
I had been purposely provocative in asking the thirty-eighth floor to “inform” me if anything I said was out of line with our mandate—in essence, challenging them to punish me for my insolence.
The truth was that the team around Kofi Annan agreed with Hans von Sponeck’s criticism of our mandate. Their attitude toward the sanctions on Iraq had been passive-aggressive from the start. They would not openly oppose the United States and Britain’s policy of containment, but their laissez-faire attitude toward von Sponeck and Halliday had been no accident. The UN’s leaders had discreetly allied themselves with the positions of the anti-sanctions activists.
My memo reminded them that such an approach clashed with our official mandate and undermined our ability to perform our job. Though I had marked the memo “for internal distribution only,” everybody understood that our fax line to Baghdad generated copies for the Iraqis and the Americans alike. Our fax room in Baghdad was manned by local staff, meaning Iraqi intelligence agents, so the Iraqi regime would inevitably learn of its existence. And though we owned a crypto-fax, the only thing that machine achieved was to alert Western interceptors to the importance of a particular transmission. They got copies all the same. (In the lead-up to the Iraq War of 2003, a British intelligence analyst went public with the information that British services eavesdropped on Annan’s telephone conversations and shared the transcripts with Washington. The revelation created a mini-scandal but surprised nobody. The UN Secretariat finds various sorts of bugs throughout the building all the time and staff always assume their conversations are monitored.)
I had been careful not to copy Kofi Annan on the memo itself. Doing so would have been amateurish. By copying everybody except the secretary general, I had created the perfect hot potato. Only loose cannons sent direct correspondence to the secretary general, and this disqualified them from being taken seriously. Here I had created a problem for his entourage. Would any of them dare react to the memo without consulting the big boss? Of course not.
While I was getting settled at my desk, my director walked into my office with a big smile on his face.
“I want you to know that I’m behind you 100 percent,” he said.
“I just sought a clarification on our mandate,” I said, playing stupid.
“Come on, Michael. You knew exactly what you were doing,” he said, and forced a smile out of me. “But I want you to know, I support you 100 percent. I said so to Pasha yesterday evening.”
“Well, thanks.…”
“He had tears in his eyes, you know.”
“Who, Pasha?”
“Yes. He spoke fondly of you. He said you reminded him of himself when he was your age.”
“Oh.…”
“And he said von Sponeck fully deserved it. But he also said he would have preferred if you hadn’t questioned Kofi Annan’s political line. He said that went too far.”
“But that was the whole point,” I said. “I couldn’t care less about von Sponeck. He’s leaving, anyway. What I want to know is, where does Kofi Annan stand?”
“Well, they called Pasha up for a meeting last night, after you left. Kofi Annan had your memo on his desk. Pasha saw it.”
“Pasha didn’t tell me. He only said they have asked to see your file now. They want to know who you are.”
“You think I’m in trouble?”
“No. I think you’re about to get promoted.”
Suddenly, Cindy appeared at my door, saying, “Yiiiii, there you are!” She literally pushed my director aside, walked over to me, took my head in her hands, and landed a big kiss on my forehead. She then lifted my tie and pinched my, um, pectorals.
“The Kid’s growing hair on his chest!” she said, looking at my director.
“Aw!”
“Good job, Michael. That was fucking ballsy!” she said.
Cindy had her own turf battle going with von Sponeck, and my memo clearly played to her advantage. Shortly after she left, Pasha appeared at the door, wagging his finger at me, but smiling.
“Careful, you!”
“What?”
“Don’t you ever send another memo like that without clearing it with me!”
I thought I’d pass on answering that one. I took full responsibility for what I had done and would do so again.
“Anyway,” said Pasha, “here’s your reply from von Sponeck.”
He threw a fax on my desk. Von Sponeck did not address any of the points I had made. He just suggested that we should meet together to discuss them when he came to New York. When we eventually sat down together weeks later, Hans was quite respectful. But he did tell me that my memo had “hurt” him. He told me that the decision to resign had not been taken lightly, after more than twenty years spent in the service of the organization. And I also knew that his final meeting with Kofi Annan had been on the “cold side.” That was as far as the secretary general would go to signal his disapproval of von Sponeck’s actions. I would have preferred if Annan had reacted by imposing some actual discipline on the operation. But still, it was a clear change of direction from the tacit approval he had offered Halliday when he resigned.
I felt bad for the assistant secretary general because I had ruined his resignation. After a long and frustrating career in the UN bureaucracy, a flamboyant resignation was considered something of a perk. One had a right to blow one’s top at least once before leaving, and an issue like the Iraq sanctions just seemed too tempting to pass up.
After his resignation, von Sponeck arranged to receive payment for his anti-sanctions activities from a German firm that exported baby-milk powder to Iraq. The firm paid him a fee for writing articles in various low-profile newspapers, in order to gain favor with the Iraqi government. I learned about this when I read the final report on the investigation into the UN Oil-for-Food program, many years later. At that point, I must admit, I felt less sorry for undermining his resignation.
The report noted that, as long as von Sponeck was not employed by the UN when he received a payment from the baby-milk exporter, he had violated no laws. However, the report also suggested that there should be a law barring former UN officials from profiting from their prior positions. At least Hans von Sponeck’s business inspired a good reform proposal.
All in all, the memo generated very little action. But the “inaction” it generated was positive, as far as I was concerned. High-level UN officials stopped offering blind support for Saddam Hussein’s propaganda campaign. Word of Annan’s “cold” reception of Hans von Sponeck actually helped clarify that our boss did, in fact, support our mission. Another thing that stopped was the use of my nickname. Nobody called me The Kid again. Well, except for my friend Spooky, but even he upgraded me to Monsieur Le Kid. Pasha no longer told me to “shadap” at meetings. He listened carefully to what I had to say. And I was no longer required to take notes of Pasha’s meetings with Iraqi officials. That privilege went to my friend Habibi, who had been imported from our mission in Baghdad for that purpose. The significance of that last change did not hit me until suddenly, one day, I found myself holding the door for the Iraqi ambassador to the UN. I had held the door as a reflex, simply because I had been aware of footsteps behind me, and I was a bit surprised to find myself nose to nose with the Iraqi ambassador. As it happens, so was he. The unintended act of politeness on my part forced us to greet, and the first thing that came out of the Iraqi ambassador’s mouth after that was, “What are you still doing here?”
“Well, I work here. Remember?”
“I thought you were on your way out,” he said with a knowing smile, before walking on.
His remark left me planted with the door in my hand. What the hell did he mean by that? Uh-oh.… Uh-oh! Had the Iraqis asked Pasha to get rid of me after seeing my memo? I remembered them asking Pasha to get rid of a number of staff, including Spooky, when we first visited Baghdad. And look what had happened to Spooky! Slowly but surely, he had been sidelined. Would the same thing now happen to me? Would I be extricated from Pasha’s inner circle?
At the time of my chance meeting with the Iraqi ambassador, months had gone by since I had sent my Tomahawk cruise memo at von Sponeck—months during which I had been walking on air, enjoying a new kind of respect from colleagues. I had been promoted once again, with a commensurate increase in salary. My Swedish director had left and been replaced by another Swedish director. Though they were both very similar in some ways (they’d never attempt to operate any device without first reading the manual), they were very different in others. Bo Asplund had eventually blown his top at Pasha. The latter had been complaining that the operation wasn’t running as it should be, and Bo had replied, “Yeah, well, the fish rots from the head!”
I don’t think anybody had ever spoken to Pasha like this. But Bo already had plans to return to UNDP, where he had been offered a new post.
My new Swedish director was named Christer Elfverson. Initially, Pasha nicknamed him Smiley Face, but that nickname quickly proved inadequate; the more he learned about the program, the less he smiled. His arrival in the office was greeted with scorn. He would be Pasha’s fourth director in three years, and the first thing I said to him when we met was that I would probably be gone soon myself. I was getting ready to move on. We had expanded the program, but we had done nothing to actually quell the fraud that we knew was going on under the surface of public diplomacy. We had failed to stop Iraqis from rewarding political friends by exporting underpriced oil through middlemen, and we had failed even to address the fact that the Iraqis were demanding kickbacks from companies exporting humanitarian goods to Iraq. Finally, our observation mechanism in Iraq had become a big joke, in the sense that it never yielded actionable information about fraud by the Iraqi regime. The resignation of two successive humanitarian coordinators had made it impossible to reform our observation process.
The last few issues fell squarely under the responsibility of the Program Management Division, which I coordinated and which my new director would head. Unless Pasha gave my new director the authority to remedy these failures, I didn’t see the point of sticking around. Corruption is like a ball of snow, goes the saying. Once it’s set rolling, it must increase. And by the time Smiley Face appeared at my doorstep to announce he had gotten the job of being my director, the ball of snow had long since set rolling. The propaganda war had been my first concern, because as long as the heads of our field mission acted as spokesmen for Saddam Hussein’s propaganda, we were politically paralyzed. Now we would have a new head of mission in the field, and I would have a new director in New York.
Would things get better? Would we be able to begin addressing the corruption that seemed to be increasingly plaguing our operation? The signs were everywhere. Even the language we used to communicate on a day-to-day basis had accommodated the corruption as a fact of life. For example, “the 10 percent rule” was UN-speak for the kickbacks demanded by Saddam’s government on imported humanitarian goods. By mid-2000 Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan had even written an official memo to all of Iraq’s ministers asking them to inflate the prices of the goods they were importing into Iraq “by as much as possible”—and at a minimum by 10 percent. The result of this policy was quite clear to us and had a direct impact on the quality of the items in Iraq’s “food basket.” The Iraqi government had enough money available to import the best-quality goods on the market. And it spent enough to do so. But with the kickbacks going to the government, the people ended up with the worst-quality food items: soap that caused skin rashes and so forth.
I briefed Smiley Face thoroughly on the situation during our first meeting together and informed him that if nothing could be done to remedy this situation, I would probably leave soon, so if he took this job, he should probably start looking for a new coordinator.
Smiley Face pledged that he would fight corruption wherever he found it. I warned him that it was not always easy to work with Pasha, but he said he considered himself senior enough to make decisions on his own. I began feeling confident that we would indeed be able to put a dent in the corruption that was affecting the operation. We would now be free from having to fight the propaganda war against our own leadership in the field. Kofi Annan’s new appointee as humanitarian coordinator in Iraq was Tun Myat, from Myanmar, and Tun had sworn to the secretary general that he would not resign in protest over the sanctions as his two predecessors had done.
This new element of stability in our field operation, coupled with a director who strongly supported my views, gave me confidence that we would be able to do some good. In addition, Pasha kept saying that he wanted his new director to be more of a “hands-on” manager. “I’m tired of doing everything myself,” he kept saying, and I just couldn’t believe our luck. Finally, the big boss was ready to delegate responsibility. Had Smiley Face somehow managed to charm him? All in all, it was a golden opportunity to get the operation back on track. All I needed to do was get my new boss up to speed on the issues, and we’d be ready for action.
Well, almost. I would also need to get him off on the right foot with Cindy.