“In this town, you’re considered innocent until investigated.”
From the 2005 film Syriana
CRUNCH GYM, EAST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2004
I was pedaling on a bicycle specifically designed to go nowhere. To compensate for the extremely uneventful nature of this activity, I was, like the rest of my pedaling neighbors, looking up at a large TV screen to see what else was going on in the world.
A week or so after my Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kofi Annan had given in to reason and ordered an independent investigation of the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal. Surprising even his most ardent critics, he had appointed Paul Volcker, a highly credible personality, to head a panel of inquiry. Volcker was the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and a veteran of high-level political investigations (Enron, the Nazi gold/Swiss banking scandal, among many others). He would lead a team of sixty international investigators, who would be given broad access to Iraqi and UN files.
I felt somewhat vindicated by this turn of events, especially vis-à-vis those who had called me a traitor. After all, Annan had gone along with what I had advocated for. Others, including Congressmen and news editors, had made similar calls. But as the first UN insider to join the chorus, I may have helped tip the scale against continued stonewalling by the thirty-eighth floor. Also, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke had specifically warned the secretary general, in a secret meeting aimed at keeping Annan’s tenure afloat, that even people who were not traditional enemies of the UN were quickly becoming its harshest critics. Annan concluded that “a dark cloud” hung over the UN and decided that his only way out was to let the light shine in.
My prediction had been that the onset of an investigation would keep the story out of the headlines for at least a few months, until Volcker’s findings were made public. I was wrong.
Suddenly, as I was pedaling at the gym, Pasha’s face appeared on the TV screen above my head.
I gasped. Pasha? What are you doing on the news? The Oil-for-Food program had shut down months ago. Pasha was getting ready to retire. Now he was being followed in the street by a Fox News camera crew. At one point, he stopped, faced the journalist, and took off his sunglasses. For a moment, it looked like he was going to head-butt the man with the microphone. What the hell was going on?
News ticker: “…high-level UN official accused of taking bribes from Saddam…”
What?
After a few brief words with the Fox News reporter, which I couldn’t hear because I didn’t have freaking earphones to plug into the bloody bike, Pasha briskly walked away. The unsteady camera followed him.
I started pedaling again, but only because the bike had Internet access. I Googled Pasha’s name and came across news reports citing Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a KPMG private investigator hired by the Iraqi authorities, saying he believed one of the names on Saddam’s secret list referred to the former under secretary general. Buried at the deep end of the list was a certain Mr. Sifan, which the Iraqis now alleged was a misspelled transliteration of Pasha’s last name: Sevan.
Mr. Sifan was listed in association with a Panamanian trading company owned by a Lebanese individual. Millions of barrels of oil had been allocated to this murky Panamanian entity in the name of Mr. Sifan.
Could Mr. Sifan really be Mr. Sevan?
The names Sifan and Sevan had only three out of five letters in common. What if this Mr. Sifan was someone else? I Googled “Sifan” to check if that was an actual name, but little came up except articles alleging Mr. Sevan’s corruption. And the deeply uncomfortable fact of the matter was, “Mr. Sifan” was exactly how our Arabic counterparts used to address Mr. Sevan.
Had my own boss been on Saddam’s payroll?
No way. I knew the guy. He wouldn’t.…
I called up Spooky. “Do you believe this shit?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I think some people are out to discredit the UN. I know things you don’t. Can’t talk now.…”
Spooky had never been wrong before.
I called up Christer: “What do you think?”
“Nah. Pasha was a lot of things, but I don’t believe he was a crook. Kofi Annan can’t believe it either. Nobody’s buying this.”
I dialed Pasha, but nobody picked up. I finally looked at my BlackBerry and feared it might short-circuit if it absorbed any more of my sweat. It showed five voicemails. Reporters and news producers, no doubt. A text message from a friend who worked in finance: “Dude, saw your boss on my Bloomberg screen. Think he did it?”
Feeling a physical pinch of panic in my heart, I finally concluded that this stationary bike was not an ideal location for multimedia crisis management. Besides, I needed to think.
As I showered, memories crept into my mind, fighting one another for my attention. I remembered Pasha quelling the agency rebellion on our first visit to Baghdad. Pasha had never been an open advocate of lifting the sanctions. He had flown under the radar, tried to make the program work. He had cried at the Baghdad hospital, in front of that little girl. Would he be able to do that and participate in a scheme to rip off Iraq’s civilians at the same time?
It just didn’t make any sense.
Pasha had made many enemies over the years. The Kurds, in particular, who now held prominent roles in the Iraqi government. The Shiites had grown resentful of the UN as well. The former Baathists had it in for us, too. I was pretty certain some of them had helped Al Qaeda engineer the bombing of our headquarters. If the list had indeed come from Saddam’s people, could it really be trusted? Or had the list been “adapted” to fit vengeful agendas?
All scenarios were possible. A lot of money had flowed through the operation under Pasha’s control. Only the investigation that was now under way could deliver real answers. But it would take months before Volcker would reveal his findings. In the meantime, the media played judge, jury, and executioner. They would insert a small quote by Pasha at the end of a given article, saying he denied the charges against him, but by the time one got to that part, Pasha looked guilty as a raccoon atop a trash can. An increasing number of such reports surfaced every day.
And yet nothing had been proven.
Instead of facing reporters and answering their questions straight up, Pasha often tried to walk away, and then, when the reporters managed to corner him, he issued moody outbursts of gobbledygook, which were then spliced into semi-understandable sound bites by news editors and organized into a news sequence that made him look like a crook on the run.
It was painful to watch. Pasha flew to the other end of the world to escape the spotlight, but when he arrived in Australia, he found reporters waiting for him in the lobby of his five-star hotel and casino resort. The media smelled blood. Pasha’s defensive statements, and the UN’s previous stonewalling, had only made the situation worse. When Pasha decided to return to New York, I felt somewhat relieved. He enjoyed diplomatic immunity, and Kofi Annan had made no threat to lift it. Annan confirmed his belief that Pasha was innocent. They had known each other for decades. And nobody I spoke to at the UN, including some of Pasha’s avowed enemies, believed in his guilt.
I hoped they were right. For Pasha’s sake, for the UN’s sake, and for the sake of all of us who had worked for this operation, I hoped Pasha was innocent. If he wasn’t, chances were I might have been at his side when the man got himself into trouble. And the last thing I wanted to do was testify against Pasha in court.
From now until the investigation was completed, everything I had ever said or done while working for Pasha could be subject to scrutiny. Every e-mail, every memo, every note would come under the microscope, as Pasha became the main target of Volcker’s $30 million probe.
When I shared my concerns with my flatmate, he laughed, then observed, “So I guess this whole investigation thing might boomerang back in your face.”
It was one way to put it.