“So, Cindy,” I said, standing confidently outside her office door. “Are you going to be nice to my new boss?”
“You mean the Elf?” she said, referring to his last name, Elfverson. “What kind of a stupid name is that?”
“Cindy.…”
“What?” She tried to look innocent, but that devilish smile on her face wouldn’t go away.
“I’ve come to plead with you,” I said. “I really think he’s a good guy. I’m sure we can find a way for you two to work together. He really seems nice.… People even call him Smiley Face!”
Cindy looked at me for a moment, then said that she felt like eating a “slab of red meat.”
“Er… sure,” I said, trying to kick the image of Cindy munching on a raw steak with blood dripping down her chin.
We went to Palm, the Italian restaurant on Second Avenue that is a notorious New York Mafia hangout. Dimly lit, with sawdust on the floor and checkered red-and-white tablecloths, the place felt like it belonged to a different decade. This was the place where the five families had struck deals with one another. And the occasional business dispute had left blood on the floor more than once. In retrospect, the setting was appropriate for the discussion that followed.
Sitting in a booth and chowing down on rare steak, Cindy and I carefully tiptoed around the real subject of our meeting until the last bloody bite. At that point, she took a large gulp of red wine and asked me point-blank: “So, Mikey, what is it you want?”
The waiter, an old Italian fellow who looked like he had witnessed enough dirty deals in his life, decided he would stay away from this one.
“I want you to get along with my new director,” I said. “I want a truce.”
“Michael, we’re talking here. What can I give you? Do you want to join my side of the shop?”
Join me, and we shall rule the empire together!
“No. I want you to get along with my boss. The Program Management Division has certain responsibilities, and I want us to be able to—”
“Michael, the Program Management Division won’t exist anymore in six months.”
“What?”
Cindy just smiled.
“But Pasha said he wanted a hands-on manager! He said—”
“How long have you worked for Pasha now?” asked Cindy.
“About three years.”
“So don’t you get it yet?”
“Get what?”
“Whatever he says, he means the opposite. There are plans in place.”
“Plans?”
“The office will be restructured. And I don’t want your boss to interfere.”
“Are you getting a promotion?” I asked.
“That’s none of your business,” said Cindy.
While she was clearly the person who wielded the most power in the office, Cindy’s grade level was still quite low. My job description and her own were just one grade apart, and I knew she wanted to establish herself as chief of office, a rather unusual title, which would allow her to yield more power than a traditional special assistant. Clearly, such a change meant that she would pull more office functions under her control, and this would come at the expense of the Program Management Division.
“I promise you he won’t interfere,” I said. “As long as we can do our work.”
“Yeah, right,” said Cindy.
“He’s my fourth director in less than three years. Does it always have to be this way? Can’t you make an effort?”
“You don’t expect me to change, do you now?” She said it with a guilty, infectious smile. Cindy, it appeared, was perfectly aware of how I perceived her. She knew she was controlling, scheming, and aggressive with men in positions of power. But it was as if she couldn’t help it. She was a fighter—a born turf warrior. She drew her energy from conflict. It wasn’t even personal. She just wasn’t about to let “that pip-squeak little shit” think he could walk in there and start running the place. Then she repeated, “Just tell me what you want. Maybe you and I can work something out.”
“I want a sane working environment! That’s why I confronted von Sponeck! I want us to work together and do a job we can be proud of! But maybe he was the wrong person to confront.”
Cindy’s expression lost its muscle, as her eyes zeroed in on mine.
Are you threatening me, Michael? She didn’t say it, but she might as well have.
“All I’m saying is, I don’t understand why you always have to—”
“Look, Michael, this isn’t Disneyland, OK? Dickheads like your boss are the reason I lost ten years in my career. Male chauvinist… cowards!”
“Cindy, come on.…”
“No, Michael! You just don’t get it.” She went on to talk about the number of times guys like my boss had undermined her, causing her to be passed up for promotions. She wanted to promote herself one grade, and to do that, she needed to pump up her job description. If my director took up all of the key responsibilities in the office, her promotion would not go through. It was a zero-sum game, the way she saw it. My director was in her way. The choice she was offering me was to step aside in return for a favor.
“I’m not going to step aside, Cindy. This guy is my director, and we’re going to get to work on a number of issues. Whether you like it or not.”
Cindy paused to take her third glass of wine. She sipped it with renewed calm, then laid her eyes on my pack of cigarettes.
“Give me one,” she said.
“Cindy, you don’t smoke.”
“I said give me one!”
“Hey, OK.…”
Cindy took a dragon drag and looked up at the plume of smoke, almost pensive.
“You’re a smart kid, Michael. But you’re too young. You don’t understand what it’s like to be stabbed in the back. From one day to the next, you’re crushed, you’re nothing. You think you’re popular, Michael? You think you’ve got friends? Wait till you’re down. You’ll see how many of those cowards come to your aid. There’s only one way to deal with these spineless bureaucrats.…” She made a fist, as if squeezing a ball sack. “It’s about control.”
I chuckled, laid my napkin on the table, and crossed my arms. She must have read the disdain on my face.
“I guess you’ll learn soon enough,” she said, cryptically.
“What it’s like.” She looked around for a waiter.
I made a last plea for her goodwill, and Cindy countered by asking me “one last time” if she could do anything for me.
“It’s up to you, Cindy,” I said, looking at her straight in the eye. “But if you’re screwing with my new boss, you’re screwing with me. And that’s not a threat. It’s a promise.”
With that, her expression turned cold.
The stage was set for a confrontation, and we both knew it. I insisted on paying the bill, as a last gesture of goodwill. She didn’t argue over it. She was already deep in thought. We said few words to each other after that. A certain sadness set into both of us as we parted. We rather liked each other, after all. And now we would have to fight.
Initially, I thought myself wise to have drawn a line in the sand with Cindy. What I didn’t fully understand was that for me to challenge Cindy to a game of bureaucratic hardball was the equivalent of Kid Rock challenging Garry Kasparov to a game of chess. I could make a ruckus, all right. But I had no experience waging a protracted turf war. I had no actual battle plan to deal with Cindy beyond warning her that I might get mad and hoping she’d back down. She, on the other hand, had planned her attack against my boss twenty moves in advance. And it began with a bureaucratic banana peel.
Shortly after my director took up his post, Cindy arranged for him to brief the Security Council on the “progress the UN had made in improving its observation mechanism in Iraq.” Initially, Christer was flattered by the opportunity to brief the Security Council. He popped his head into my office with a big smile and waved the memo. After I read it, I looked up at him and said, “Uh-oh.”
“What?” asked Christer, suddenly worried.
“Well, the briefing is about what progress we’ve made,” I said.
“Yes… and?” Christer didn’t get it.
“Well, the thing is, we haven’t made any progress,” I said.
“What do you mean?” asked Christer, sitting down. “The invitation mentions a promise we made to the Council over a year ago!”
I knew that only too well, since I was in charge of updating the famous Status Sheet tracking our progress. In this case, we had promised the Council to dramatically improve on our so-called observation mechanism in Iraq, in return for their tripling the money available to Iraq under the program.
Now, to begin with, we hardly had an “observation mechanism” to speak of. What we had was a bunch of guys riding around in cars with their Iraqi minders and reporting whatever the officials were telling them—that is, when these officials were in a mood to answer their questions.
Everybody remembers the footage of the weapons inspectors going out on inspections only to be blocked or stalled by their Iraqi minders. Such incidents, when videotaped, usually led to crises between Iraq and the international community. But our humanitarian observers never made a big deal out of being blocked. As a result, they were blocked all the time. They would simply be told, “Don’t go there” or “Don’t report on that,” and they would comply. So what the world saw on television was weapons inspectors whipping out camcorders to show the Iraqi regime’s stalling tactics on the issue of the weapons of mass destruction. What people did not get to see was how the UN system turned a blind eye to the government’s mistreatment of its citizens through blatant political discrimination in the distribution of the humanitarian goods it was allowed to buy under our program.
How could we report that the Oil-for-Food program had ensured equitable distribution of medicines when it was clear to everybody that the hospitals in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit had their stocks full and the hospitals in the Shiite south remained chronically underprovisioned? How could we report that food was distributed equitably when we knew full well that entire chunks of Iraq’s population, like the Marsh Arabs, were being denied ration cards? We participated in the cover-up because we spent most of our time quibbling among ourselves. In the case of the observers, they were split into three units, and the greatest concern of each unit was to know what the others were observing, in case it contradicted their own findings. In effect, our observers were observing one another instead of observing the Iraqis.
The job of the UN observers was by no means easy. But it did not help that our senior managers in Baghdad basically disagreed with the mandate the Security Council had given them. After working for two successive heads of mission who openly disagreed with the sanctions, our observers had become used to acting as advocates for the lifting of the sanctions instead of actually keeping count of what goods went where. This was made evident to me when I first had the opportunity to meet with the observers in Baghdad in November 1997.
I had expected an orderly briefing on their activities and was treated instead to something akin to an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. The observers—about forty of them—were sitting like audience members in a room, and Pasha, Halliday, and I were on a panel. Pasha made a depressing introductory statement about the thankless job they had and then opened the floor for questions. That’s when the show started in earnest.
One after the other, the observers took to the microphone and made grand declarations against the United States, the Security Council, and, most important, their rivals within the UN mission itself, whom they referred to as “some people.” Each intervention was interrupted with clapping or booing. Most of them talked about the frustrations involved in their work, and some concluded their remarks by calling for a lifting of the sanctions, which inevitably got them a round of applause. This was a far cry from the crack team of expert monitors envisaged by London and Washington when they first drew up their plans for the Oil-for-Food program. Our guys were a mixed bag of humanitarian workers, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, who did their best to adapt to this most unusual mission. Nonetheless, these were the people we had to work with.
When they weren’t riding around in cars, our observers were engaged in bitter turf wars that made basic information-sharing between them impossible. Pasha had promised the Security Council we would establish a unified database that would act as a repository for all relevant humanitarian information, but the distrust among the UN agencies made such a project impossible to deliver on. It did not help that two of our observation units—one headed by a Frenchman who spoke no English and the other by an Englishman with a stiff upper lip—hated each other with a vengeance and were, in turn, hated by the UN agency heads in Baghdad, whose observation duties overlapped with their own. They all accused one another of changing their reports. Among the observers themselves, an ethnic rivalry had developed between the “Arabs” and the “Africans”—who together formed a majority of our observer pool. It should perhaps be explained to outside observers that Arab racism toward Africans is generally far less clouded in political correctness than the racism that exists in Western cultures. In Arabic, the word that describes black people is the same word that describes servants. This, in addition to the overlapping responsibilities assigned to different observers and the stress they were under from the Iraqi regime, contributed to making our so-called observation mechanism a gargantuan mess.
After expanding the program, the Security Council had asked us to double the number of our observers on the ground in Iraq. This should have been easy, as it was just a matter of recruitment. Unfortunately, the UN recruitment system was organized in such a way that no single person had responsibility for it. Thus, at each step in the bureaucratic process, a tiny drop of bad will (of which we had bucketloads) would cause the whole system to grind to a complete halt. This meant that it took us up to a year to recruit and deploy an observer to Iraq. The most qualified people would usually not wait that long, which meant that we would have to start all over again with a new, less qualified candidate. Our budgeted posts were never filled, and we never functioned at full capacity. Not for a single day did we have all of our observers deployed on the ground in Iraq. So, while on paper we had promised an increase in the number of our observers, their number had in fact decreased through sheer bureaucratic attrition.
This last fact had caused me to rush into Cindy’s office during the week when my new director was still settling in to explain that we needed to get our act together on the recruitment of observers or else look like fools in front of the Security Council. Clearly, this gave her an idea.
According to protocol, briefings to the Security Council were to be delivered by the highest official in charge, which meant that Pasha should have been the one to go and look like a fool. But Pasha was increasingly traveling, and Cindy had managed to arrange the briefing at a time when Pasha would be out of the office, so that Smiley Face would be the one to end up on the hot seat. There was a real risk that Smiley Face would lose all credibility with the UN Security Council on his first appearance, and this would allow Cindy to sideline him (and our whole division) more easily afterward.
“So what am I supposed to tell the Council?” asked Christer, now livid.
“We’re going to have to tell them the truth,” I said.
“But, I mean…” He twitched nervously while looking for words.
“Don’t worry. I’ll put it in UN-ese for you.”
If history were written in UN-ese, the battle of Waterloo might be considered a French military success. UN-ese usually includes a lot of sentences without an active subject: “all efforts must be made, all precautions should be taken, issues must be identified and remedies ought to be found, etc.…” By whom and how? one might ask. And the answer would usually be “by all concerned” and “in consultation with all relevant authorities.”
Nonetheless, there was a limit to how good an impression we could give of the situation. Besides, we had a responsibility to be honest and forthright with the Security Council. The advantage Christer had was that he was new, and so I decided to go easy on the UN-ese and actually send him in with a straightforward briefing. Instead of saying the situation was dandy, we would come in and say it was less than satisfactory. This, I hoped, would reverse the nature of the meeting from one where we got grilled to one where we would do our mea culpa. In order to defuse possible criticism, I also called some key aides at some of the missions and made a case for them to go easy on my new director. The aides bought my pitch, and Christer was able to deliver his briefing to a receptive audience.
Christer told them there were serious problems with our observation mechanism and that he would endeavor to fix them as a matter of priority. Above the table, Christer’s delivery was good. Below the table, his foot was dancing salsa. He had good reason to be nervous, for at that point he had only a limited understanding of the realities on the ground.
Christer’s briefing was a success. He appeared honest, articulate, and committed to doing a better job. The ambassadors did not rip into him, as Cindy had hoped they would. Instead, they wished him good luck.
After the briefing, I passed Cindy in the corridor and thanked her, on my boss’s behalf, for the “opportunity” to brief the Security Council. That was UN-ese for “Bring it on, bitch!”
But Cindy knew exactly how to spin the meeting to Pasha. When the big boss returned to the office, she told him that Christer had criticized the operation in front of the Security Council. Pasha’s reaction was to block Christer from any further interaction with the Council. The turf war between Smiley Face and Cindy was engaged.
I decided to appeal directly to Pasha, but much to my surprise, I found it really hard to get a meeting with him. His secretary treated me as if I was a stranger all of a sudden, and I had to schedule an appointment like everyone else.
“Forget it,” I said. “Just tell him I need to speak with him. That it’s important. He’ll call me when he has a moment.” But Pasha never got in touch. What the hell was going on?
A week later, we received a memo. The entire Program Management Division was ordered to move out of the building at One UN Plaza and over to the Daily News Building on Forty-Second Street. In UN terms, that was like sending us to Antarctica.
With the memo in hand, I walked into Pasha’s office without taking an appointment. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It wasn’t my decision,” said Pasha. “We’re running out of space, and the Daily News Building was the only place available. It’s a temporary thing.…”
“Did Cindy talk you into this?”
“Look, give me a facking break with Cindy. At least she comes to me with solutions. With your boss, it’s always problems.”
Surely, Pasha meant to say “decisions.” Christer needed Pasha to make decisions, yes. And the last decision he needed Pasha to make was a pretty important one, too.
Christer had received a call one day from a Swedish company that was negotiating a contract to sell trucks to Iraq. The Iraqis were demanding the traditional 10 percent kickback payment, but the Swedish CEO hesitated and called Christer for advice. Christer went into a panic when he received the call. He wrote Pasha a confidential memo about the incident and advised that we should inform the Security Council that we had concrete evidence of Saddam Hussein’s fraud.
Pasha exploded.
“Enough with all this hoolabaloo!” That’s how he referred to the kickbacks. “We’re not facking Sherlock Holmes! We can’t investigate every case we hear about! This is none of your facking business!”
To my director and me, failure to advise the Security Council constituted a failure to do our job, and we said so very clearly in e-mail communications to other colleagues. When word of this got back to Pasha, he got even angrier, and decided to blame Christer for “bad-mouthing” him.
Though Cindy generally agreed with me on the substance and also felt we should advise the Security Council of the kickback issue, she used Pasha’s anger with Christer to play for advantage in our ongoing turf war. Instead of helping us persuade Pasha to do the right thing, she confirmed his belief that we were out to undermine him. And after that, it was only child’s play to convince him to move our division to Antarctica.
Pasha seemed increasingly suspicious of just about everyone in the office and seemed to go along with anything Cindy wanted him to do. He seemed increasingly aloof, often traveling to Geneva or Lebanon without warning.
“What are you going to Geneva for?” Christer asked him at a staff meeting.
“None of your goddamn business,” Pasha said.
It turned out that there was a meeting of OPEC ministers in Geneva. What was Pasha doing hobnobbing with the world’s oil traders? I suppose he had become sort of an oil producer himself. Take away the UN Oil-for-Food program, and the oil markets would lose access to the second-largest oil reserves on the planet. This gave Pasha some cachet in the corridors of the oil conference. He liked being around influential people, and I rationalized, at the time, that merely networking was reason enough for him to travel around so much. Had I paused to think about this, I would probably have begun to ask myself more questions. But my mind was primarily focused on problems closer to home. I would sometimes wonder if there was really anybody at the wheel of this gigantic operation we were supposed to be running. Kofi Annan probably assumed that his deputy, Louise Fréchette, had the situation under control. And she probably assumed that Pasha was in charge. Or at least that Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, had him under control. Pasha, in turn, was content to let Cindy sit in the control room. We might have done a fine job together, Cindy and I, had she not felt a compulsive need to eradicate my division from the office map. But the internal battles she was waging (and now winning) were probably the best reason she had to wake up in the morning. And the morning on which we were scheduled to pack up and move out of the main office was a glorious one for her.
As we packed up to move, Cindy walked around the office snickering. She walked into Christer’s corner office, even as he was leaving with a box in his hands, and started moving around the furniture. As soon as he was out of earshot, she stepped out and declared, “Good riddance!” loud enough for the rest of the office to hear.
To further ensure that the Program Management Division could no longer function coherently, Cindy sabotaged our e-mail system by ordering the IT guy to provide us with slower-than-dial-up-speed access to our mailboxes. The system she had “approved” for us crashed about four times a day, and for three weeks we couldn’t communicate with our mission in the field or with the rest of the UN offices in New York. Finally, she ordered the secretaries who worked for Pasha to bar us from access to the files in his office. I don’t know what kind of threats they were under to comply with this order, but one day, after I picked up a report I needed to refer to in a meeting, one of the secretaries literally ran after me.
She was a sweet woman from Madagascar. I had previously helped her son apply to a good high school, and we were on excellent terms. I didn’t notice her following me out of the office. I hadn’t even imagined that borrowing the file might be an issue, and she was a very small person, so it was difficult for her to catch up with me as I was hurrying to a meeting. She followed me for several blocks, all the way over to the Daily News Building, before I finally noticed someone shouting my name. I turned around and saw her running toward me.
“Hey, darling, what’s going on? Are you all right?” I asked after she caught up.
“Cindy said no files should leave the office,” she said, still struggling to catch her breath.
“And you followed me all the way here?” I asked.
“She’ll kill me!” she said, physically begging for the file with her hands.
“But… I mean, we still work in the same office, right?” I said. “My office here is still part of ‘the office.’ It’s just two different locations, that’s all. I’m sure Cindy didn’t mean that only she and Pasha could have access to the files—how are we supposed to work?”
“Please, Michael.…” she pleaded, wild-eyed, with sweat dripping from her forehead.
Wow. The poor woman was scared. It was no use arguing with her—she didn’t make the rules. She was just a foot soldier in Cindy’s growing empire of paranoia. Or perhaps it was Pasha’s. It was hard to tell what the power dynamic was between them. Was she manipulating the big boss or was she simply doing his bidding? One way or the other, the department that was officially supposed to “manage” the program in New York was physically and irrevocably cut off from the information flow of Pasha’s office.
We wondered how we were supposed to do our work until it became crystal clear that the less we did, the happier Pasha and Cindy were. Pasha never visited our office and never called us over. If he sent us any communication at all, it was to further restrict our responsibilities. Pasha and Cindy’s master plan would become clear a year later, when they would request a surprise audit of the Program Management Division.
“What have these bozos done to manage the program?” Pasha would ask the auditors.
This was a classic UN battle plan. Restrict the powers of an office, then attack it for not achieving anything. We would come to the office in the morning, complain all day, and go home at night. People started drinking more than was reasonable at lunch, and there were so many prescription drugs circulating in the office that we could have opened a pharmacy. More than half of the people in the office had some kind of back problem, which was a testament to our collective bad chakra. When my colleagues weren’t popping muscle relaxants before meetings, it would be Valium or Xanax. Many of the secretaries were getting high at lunch hour in the UN gardens, then spending afternoons downloading music from the web.
We still held meetings, but I had to point out, at the end of them, that I had nothing of relevance to put down in my meeting notes. The pleading looks in my colleagues’ eyes read, Can’t you just pretend? But no, I could not.
I did my best to stay sane. I went to the gym every day at lunch. I took a night class in screenwriting at New York University. I moved downtown, to the East Village, where there was no shortage of partying going on. But as much as I would have liked to find the answers to my angst in the New York circuit, it mostly just ratcheted up my sense of general panic on hungover mornings.
I tried ignoring my colleagues altogether in order to escape their constant whining, thereby isolating myself further from the people who cared for me the most. Some of my senior colleagues were used to being sidelined at various times in their UN careers. I wasn’t. I began to realize that every initiative we took and every problem we tried to resolve wound up being blocked in some way or other.
A UN audit report eventually questioned the wisdom of isolating the Program Management Division from the rest of the office, but that report took several years to emerge. Gradually, I began to malfunction.
I started having bouts of Paper Flow Paranoia that almost rivaled Cindy’s. I started snapping at junior colleagues for absurd reasons. Once, I arrived at the office moody from having been inadvertently pushed into the elevator, to find that some denizen of the cubicle prairie in the Contracts Processing Division had posted pictures of an office party on the Internet. I flew into a rage because as “acting spokesman for the program” I hadn’t been “consulted,” and I sent a nasty e-mail berating the poor kid for treating his workplace like a “summer camp” and holding him personally responsible if the Iraqis decided to use the pictures to accuse us of “partying with Iraq’s oil revenues.”
My reaction was completely off-the-wall paranoid. When I finally came to my senses, I managed to apologize to him. But there was something about snapping that I enjoyed, for it allowed me to express my hate.
I was fast becoming a real asshole. My social life was equally affected. When people inquired about how my day had gone, they got an earful. My friends worried about me. But there was not much they could do, because whenever they mildly observed that I seemed to be angry all the time, I would snap. My peaceful Norwegian flatmate came home one day and, looking at the remnants of a door I had kicked in half, asked me what had happened. I started talking about my day.
I had come home that evening with the intention of working on a screenplay for my writing class at NYU, but I wasn’t able to concentrate because of a memo Cindy had sent to Pasha that afternoon, in which she had cc’d Christer and implied something I felt deeply offended by. As a result, I couldn’t concentrate on my screenwriting, because my mind kept going back to the memo we were planning to write in retaliation, which we would cc to Cindi (misspelling her name just to irritate her). After an hour of trying desperately to concentrate, I snapped, karate-kicked my door, and sat down on the sofa to watch the news, only to start fuming about the coverage of Iraq.
It eventually occurred to me that I was well on my way to ruining all aspects of my life if I didn’t find a way to shed the extreme frustration that had possessed me in the past few months. I saw two options. I could either leave the UN and let the stupid turf wars continue without me or stay on and make a difference in the world by destroying Cindy.
Everybody wondered why Pasha was letting her have her way around the office. Christer speculated that Cindy was somehow blackmailing Pasha.
“She has to have something on him,” he kept saying. But what? We could only speculate, even as she pursued her schemes to render us more irrelevant by the day.
Then, one night, an opportunity to take revenge materialized. It all started with a panicked call to my cellphone.
“AAAHHHHH!” The scream pierced my eardrums, forcing me to hold the receiver away from my head.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!”
“Habibi? Is that you?”
“Man! You won’t believe what just happened!”
I was at an uptight cocktail party on the Upper East Side. There were people here of princely descent, and they, too, heard the scream coming out of my phone. I stepped out into the corridor and leaned against the coat rack.
“Dude, what’s the matter? You OK?”
“No! She tried to… AHHHHH!”
“All right, calm down, man. What’s going on?”
“She went out of control on me! She wanted me to eat her pussy!”
“Who? Lucy?”
“No!”
“Kim?”
“No!”
It could have been any number of women. Since leaving Baghdad for New York, Habibi had become something of a hipster. He had bought a mountain bike, which he rode through the city every evening in a wild bid to lose weight. And it worked. With his body quickly taking the shape of an Adonis statue, and a redesigned wardrobe to match, he was determined to make up for the three sexually frustrating years he had spent in Baghdad. With his British accent, his smooth Lebanese charm, and a healthy dose of self-effacing humor, Habibi launched out on the New York dating scene with Travolta-like zeal.
“So who was it, then?” I asked.
“Cindy!”
“WHAT?”
“She wanted me to eat her pussy!”
“I’m hammered! But she was even worse! Jesus, I can’t go to the office tomorrow. This is totally fucked up!”
“All right, chill out, man. Let me get out of here. I’ll meet you for a drink in ten minutes.”
We met at Le Bateau Ivre, a discreet French wine bar in the east fifties. A normally calm and composed guy, Habibi looked like he had just come back from running with the bulls in Pamplona. And fallen down. His collar was out of whack, and his tie was hanging out of his coat pocket. Even at the height of the 1998 bombing in Baghdad, when he was hiding down in the basement of the UN compound while the windows above were being shattered by the shockwaves, his voice on the phone had remained controlled. But that night, his pitch was bordering on hysterical. Poor Habibi. What had the woman done to him?
Cindy was Habibi’s direct supervisor. It was she who had yanked him out of Baghdad. The transfer of Habibi to UN headquarters was part of Cindy’s master plan to expand her own power within the office. As chief of office (we called her Queen of Office), she could get her own assistant, which meant she could bypass my director for key jobs that would normally be assigned to us.
Since Cindy and Christer were in savage competition, Habibi and I were increasingly given similar assignments from our respective bosses. We had a talk about this and swore to each other that no matter how acidic relations got between our supervisors, we would work things out between us. We weren’t going to mirror their behavior. We’d stay pals no matter what.
Cindy had made it quite clear that she disliked my visits to his office. Especially when she heard laughter coming out of there, for she assumed (often rightly) that she was the butt of our jokes. Once, she banged on her wall really hard and yelled, “Habibi, get back to work! Michael, stop distracting My Little Habibi!”
“Dude,” I whispered. “She calls you My Little Habibi?”
“She calls you Mikey!” said Habibi, all defensive.
“Used to,” I corrected him. Cindy had stopped calling me Mikey after my memo to von Sponeck. For a period, she addressed me simply as Michael. Then, after I confronted her at the Mafiosi restaurant, I became Mister, a term that had a distinctly negative connotation coming out of her mouth.
“You just sit tight, Mister. We have it under control. My Little Habibi will take care of it.”
“I’ll make sure to coordinate with you,” Habibi would venture, before Cindy had a chance to frown at him. On occasion, she would interrupt him in midsentence with a “Shush!” The room would fill up with discreet smiles. This obviously irritated Habibi, but he was powerless to do much about it. His career was entirely in her hands, and he could not afford to piss her off.
This predicament put him in a bit of a bind on the night of his distress call.
“We were having drinks at this Mexican restaurant,” he said, after I had rushed out of my cocktail party to meet up with him. He was drinking water now and looking pale. “We had all these margaritas, and she was getting all rowdy, touching my leg and stuff.”
“Well, come on, Habibi, that’s no big deal,” I said.
“No, you don’t understand. She slid her hand all the way up!”
“Oh.…”
“She fondled me, man! She fondled me right in the middle of the bar! There were all these people looking at us.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I tried to pay the tab, but then she ordered two more margaritas!”
“Shit.…”
“Then… then she fell off her chair!”
“Wow.…”
“And when I picked her up, she wouldn’t let go of me. She tried to kiss me. I was like, ‘Cindy, please!’ But she was, like, licking my face! Everybody was watching. It was horrible.”
“Fuck, man.”
“Wait, it got worse! I tried to take her to a cab, right?”
“Right.…”
“But she blocked the door!”
“What door?”
“The exit door! At the bar! She wouldn’t get out! I tried to reason with her, but I sort of had to hold her up. She was kind of unstable, and she started wiggling her ass against my crotch!”
“Holy shit.…”
“In front of everybody!”
“Man.… Did you manage to get her in a cab?”
“Yeah.”
“Phew!”
“No, man, it got worse!”
“How?”
“Dude… she made you?”
“She pulled me in! She said I needed to take her home!”
I shook my head, incredulous.
“And I kind of felt worried, too, you know—she could hardly walk.”
“OK… so you went to her apartment?”
“I tried to leave her at the door, but.…”
I had been to Cindy’s apartment myself, once, back when we were on good terms. She invited me up one night after work. She lived close to the United Nations, and as we walked home, I mentioned that I was looking for a good air-conditioner. She said I should check out hers, since she lived right up the block. I had barely leaned over the device when the music came on. Seconds later, Cindy was in the act of fixing me a drink. Sensing the onset of a Mrs. Robinson scenario, I came up with a lame pretext and fled in short order. Her Little Habibi had tried to do the same, but with less success.
“She pulled me down on the couch,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me go before I had a drink.” After he managed to fight his way back up, the woman adopted a rather explicit pose and ordered Her Little Habibi to go down on her. Before he was able to get away from this wild sexual advance, poor Habibi was accused, twice, of being a “male coward.”
I exploded in laughter, but Habibi didn’t think it was funny at all.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “I can’t show up at the office tomorrow! It’ll be too embarrassing!”
“Dude, she’s the one who should be embarrassed. Not you.”
Habibi thought about it for a bit.
“Do you think this constitutes sexual harassment?” he asked. I don’t believe I was able to prevent a diabolical smile from invading my face. Until Habibi uttered the words, it hadn’t really occurred to me. Now here was Habibi, a young male fearing for his career after refusing to perform oral sex on his female boss. She had insulted him, too. And he was traumatized to the point that he would not come back to work the next day.
Bingo! Here was an opportunity to crush Cindy. All I needed was Her Little Habibi’s cooperation.
“Of course it’s sexual harassment, Habibi! You can’t let this stand!”
“But what am I supposed to do?”
“You could complain to Human Resources.”
“Are you crazy? She’d cut my balls off!”
“No she wouldn’t. I’ll look into what recourse you have, if you want. There’s got to be some kind of UN office that handles this stuff.”
There had been many incidences of sexual harassment at UN headquarters. And what happened in New York was nothing compared to what happened in the field missions, where young staffers often have little recourse. Even the head of the United Nations Refugee Agency was being sued for sexual harassment, after he allegedly patted a fifty-year-old coworker on the behind. He denied having done so in a sexual manner and argued that his move had simply been meant affectionately. The guy was from Holland, and it must be said that in Northern Europe, if a woman feels offended at having her behind smacked, she’ll generally make it clear right away rather than engage in lengthy lawsuits. Of course, the coworker in question was American and liable to be offended by much less than a pat on the bum, so she pursued her case against him for years, eventually forcing him to resign.
“Wouldn’t you want Cindy gone?” I asked Habibi.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
“You can’t do what?”
“The whole sexual harassment thing. It would be too humiliating. Imagine what people would say.…”
“You’ve done nothing wrong, Habibi. You’re the victim here!”
“Right,” said Habibi, putting his head in his hands. “Shit, man. What if I just ignore it completely—like nothing happened?”
“It’s an option,” I said. “But what if it happens again? I mean, where does it stop?”
I almost had Habibi convinced, but my eagerness to see him bring down the woman I had come to see as my nemesis caused me to screw it up.
“Here’s how we’ll do it,” I continued. “Tomorrow, I will call up the Human Resources department and ask them what recourse you have. Then, we’ll draft an official complaint letter, which we’ll copy to the Office of Legal Affairs. Then…”
“Look,” said Habibi, bringing his head back up. “I really don’t want any fuss. Just let me handle it, all right?”
“Sure, man. Whatever… maybe she was right to call you a male coward.”
It was a mean thing to say, and we left on rather cold terms. Habibi had come to me for help, and as far as he was concerned, I had only offered to make things worse for him with all my talk of legal action. But I was disappointed. We’d never get a better chance to neutralize this pest of a woman.
Habibi didn’t exactly “handle it,” as promised. Cindy did it for him. She walked into the office at around 11:00 a.m. the next day, sunglasses and all, and casually stopped by his desk.
“How badly do I need to apologize for last night?” she asked. “I don’t remember anything after my third margarita.”
“It’s fine,” said Habibi. “Don’t worry about it.”
At lunch, when he recounted how easily he had let her off the hook, I was boiling inside.
I made a point of visiting Habibi in his office that afternoon. Habibi was so stressed out that he literally couldn’t speak to me. All he could do was address me in panicked sign language, pointing to the partition wall that separated his office from Cindy’s and urging me to get out of there as soon as I could.
“Are you OK, man?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah.…” And then in sign language Shush! She’s HERE! Go! Get the fuck out of here before she hears you!
Habibi was dead scared that Cindy might realize he had spoken to me about last night. But I knew that this was exactly the button to press if I wanted to dissuade her from treating Her Little Habibi as a sex poodle in the future.
Instead of leaving, I laughed out loud, not least because Habibi’s erratic arm movements were really funny. Habibi rolled his eyes at the ceiling. I can’t imagine the expression on Cindy’s face next door. But she didn’t bang on the partition wall this time. It wasn’t as if she had really forgotten what had happened the previous night.
I spent some five minutes with Habibi, discussing work, even as he looked at me pleadingly. Can we do this another time? He appeared so stressed that I decided to leave him be. But not before stopping by Cindy’s office.
“Hello there!” I said. “How are you feeling today?”
She would have gladly thrown a machete at my face. She could tell, by my smile, that I had been briefed on her behavior the previous night.
“What do you want?” she asked, stone-faced.
“Oh, nothing! Just saying hi, that’s all.… I heard the margaritas are pretty stiff at that Mexican bar!”
Her eyes were vibrating with rage.
“I’m busy,” she said. “Some people have real jobs around here!”
“Well, you better get cracking!” I said, stepping away, half-expecting Cindy to jump over her desk and attempt a tackle.
Confident that my visit had destabilized her, I walked past Habibi, who was sitting frozen at his desk, sweating beads. Well, at least he wasn’t the only one sweating now. His boss deserved to share at least some of the stress she had inflicted on him.
Unfortunately, things did not improve much for Habibi after that. While Cindy never commanded him to give her oral sex again, or called him a male coward, she nonetheless kept treating him like a poodle at the office. Except now he was a poodle she was angry with. And that’s not a fun position to be in at all.
Habibi eventually fled the office and the city of New York, which he had grown to love so much, for a UN posting in Beirut. Far, far away from Cindy.
But before he had a chance to leave, I began devising a scheme that would bring the Queen of Office down. If Habibi wasn’t going to lodge a complaint for sexual harassment, I thought I might bring the matter to the UN personnel office myself. I rationalized that I was out to protect Habibi’s career, should Cindy continue to harass him. But the truth was, I was pursuing a personal vendetta. My first gig as a bureaucratic backstabber was well under way when I heard a knock at my door, which I was now in the habit of keeping closed all the time. I flung my research into sexual harassment rules into a drawer and answered with an explicitly angry “Yes?”
At my door was a young, timid kid whose smile had been distorted by fear.
Kid: Um… hi.
Me: What is it?
Kid: Well, I… we had an appointment?
Me: What appointment? I don’t have anything on my schedule. Who are you?
He told me his name, which I instantly forgot. I tried to place him in the context of the ongoing office turf war. We had employed so many new people to process the truckloads of Iraqi contracts being sent to us that I was losing track of new faces.
Me: Who sent you?
Kid: Ah… what?
Me: Where are you from?
Kid: Queens?
The kid made every statement sound like a question, adding to my irritation.
Me: What do you mean, Queens?
Me: I meant what division. What department? What section? Who do you work for?
Kid: Oh, well, nobody, at the moment.…
Then I remembered. The kid had e-mailed me a few weeks ago. He was looking for “guidance,” meaning he wanted a job at the United Nations. He said he’d found my name on the alumni list of Brown University, and in a moment of generosity I had told him to swing by the office.
“Take a seat,” I told him, somewhat angrily. “So, how can I help you?” I asked, looking at my watch. I could tell he was feeling intimidated, and for some reason I was enjoying it. He stumbled on his words and I interrupted him.
“Why do you want to work at the United Nations?” I asked him.
“Well, it would be a dream come true,” he said, “to be able to help other people… people in need across the world.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle.
“What if I told you it’s actually a nightmare?” I asked. “What if I told you we spend most of our time fighting each other… right here in the office? What if I told you we don’t really give a shit about the starving kids out there? Would you still want to come and work here?”
The poor kid was totally taken aback. He fumbled for words, not knowing whether to take me seriously. Then I felt bad.
“Just kidding,” I said. He smiled, visibly relieved. And so was I, because the guilty feeling I got when I thought I was spoiling his innocence was deeply uncomfortable. He would discover the truth soon enough. Why rush it? I guess that’s why parents lie to their kids about Santa. They want them to believe the world is good.
Not too long ago, I had been just like the kid sitting in front of me. He was in awe of the institution that was supposed to advance the cause of peace and human dignity. But was that really what we were doing?
I had seen too much hypocrisy—too many battles for the moral high ground conducted by people and nations that had only self-interest in mind. Too many turf wars, too much resentment, too much paranoia, too much cynicism. I felt drained of positive energy. The hate that had grown inside me was eating away at me, transforming me into a man I had never intended to become. What kind of person spends his afternoon trying to nail a colleague for sexual harassment? Without the consent of the person who was harassed? Jesus, I thought. I’m turning into Linda Tripp!
By allowing myself to hate, I was fast becoming what I despised. Soon, I would probably be no better than Cindy. No better than Pasha. No better than von Sponeck or Halliday. All of us started out naïve and eager, like the young kid now sitting in front of me. The “system” had taken them in and transformed them into angry and paranoid bureaucrats who, unable even to get along with one another, were in no position to promote unity in the larger world. How had it done this to them? The answer now seemed evident. The system promotes hatred. Why? Because the system lacks that essential component of social order: accountability.
As I listened to the young kid talk about his dreams and aspirations, I felt rotten. Where had my own dreams and aspirations gone? We parted with a promise that I would help him get his foot in the door at the UN—preferably into one of the UN agencies like UNICEF, which had a clear mandate and better management than the UN Secretariat. Then I sat back down, emotionally exhausted by the effort it took me not to launch into a cynical tirade about the UN. I swiveled around in my chair and looked out the window. I stared into space for a long time before a vision formed in my mind. It was a scary vision—that of a building collapsing, like a house of cards.
I had to get out before it was too late. Notwithstanding my strange visions of buildings collapsing, I was one step away from becoming a bureaucrat’s version of Darth Vader. I had the ambition, I had the skill, and I had the anger. What I did not have much left of was perspective. Were it not for that kid, I might have lost it for good.
I turned around and looked at my computer screen. I had never written a letter of resignation before. I fumed at the thought that I was letting Cindy off the hook, that I let her beat me without fighting back. But years later, I would thank heaven for my decision to desist. Cindy was the wrong enemy. We had been set up and manipulated. The person pulling the strings would soon get rid of her, too. If Cindy and I had shared information instead of fighting, we could have connected the dots of a truly rotten scheme. Many years would go by, many people would die, and many buildings would collapse before that final secret could be unearthed.