Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

  Sergeant William von Zehle, a fifty-two-year-old retired fireman from Wilton, Connecticut, who was in Iraq as an army civil affairs officer, was sitting at his computer in the U.S. military building across the narrow lane that ran alongside the Canal. The explosion, which he thought was just outside his window, threw him to the ground. He saw an intense orange light and felt a sharp pain in his right thigh. His windows had shattered, and he had been stabbed by a four-inch piece of glass. He yanked the glass, which was like a knife blade, out of his leg and tried to scrape a piece of shrapnel from his arm. He looked at the clock on his desk, which had stopped. It was 4:28.

  When von Zehle made his way to the roof of his building, he saw that the neighboring Canal Hotel was on fire. He radioed his commander and got permission to head in the direction of the attack. As he moved along the access road connecting his office building and the UN headquarters, he broke into a covered rush, cocking his AK-47 and alternating dashes with a colleague. As the pair approached the scene of the explosion, they saw that almost all of the UN’s navy blue vehicles with orange lettering that had been in the parking lot were ablaze. For the first time in Iraq, von Zehle thought his firefighting experience would be of use. “This had become a fire rescue,” he remembers. “I needed cranes, floodlights, shoring equipment.”

  After a long day of patrols Captain Vance Kuhner, a U.S. reservist in charge of a military police unit, had returned to his base, a collection of tents beside Saddam Hussein’s Martyr’s Monument, a little under a mile from the Canal. After ordering his men to unload their Humvees, Kuhner was walking toward the barracks for a shower and a bite to eat. As he passed the cement volleyball court where children were playing, he was knocked to his knees by the explosion behind him. He got up quickly, turned around, and saw the dark gray cloud in the distance. “Get back in the vehicles,” he shouted to his men. “Someone’s been hit.” He assumed that a Coalition helicopter or plane had gone down, or that a U.S. convoy had been ambushed. “I need every medic I have,” he radioed his commander. Andre Valentine, a firefighter paramedic, loaded up four Humvees with six medics. “Follow the smoke,” Valentine told the driver of his Humvee.

  In her small office adjoined to Vieira de Mello’s, Lyn Manuel was confused. A few seconds before the explosion she had turned her head away from her boss’s door in order to make a phone call. And almost as soon as she picked up the receiver, she had gone blind in both eyes. She thought that an electric wire had fallen from the ceiling and that she had been electrocuted. Panicked, she began crying out to her office mate, Ranillo Buenaventura. “Rannie, Rannie,” she shouted, “help me.” But when he ignored her cries, she thought perhaps he had slipped out of the office without her notice. Manuel started to call out again but quickly stopped herself. She was afraid her cries would disturb Vieira de Mello’s meeting.

  Larriera had been miraculously untouched by flying debris in her office, but like Manuel, she was in a state of shock. Having seen Rishmawi stand up, she darted out of her office and began navigating her way along the pitch-black hallway toward Vieira de Mello, who she knew would be worried about her. Because of the power outage and the dust clouds, she couldn’t see down the hall, but she half-expected to bump into him as she walked. She called out his name softly: “Sergio. I’m here, Sergio . . . Are you there?” The building was still shaking from the force of the blast, and she could smell what she thought might be gunpowder.

  Manuel, who still could not see, made her way out of her office in the hopes of finding help elsewhere in the building. If she had turned right instead of left, she might have fallen into a three-story pit of burning concrete, metal, and furniture. Instead she groped her way through her doorway and toward the staircase, which was in the opposite direction from the source of the explosion. In all likelihood Manuel, who was hugging one wall, passed Larriera, who was sliding along the opposite wall, but neither was aware of the other’s presence.

  Larriera had a firm destination in mind. She wanted to reach the private side door to Vieira de Mello’s office—a door that only she had permission to enter. But as she continued along the wall, she saw that at the end of the corridor the lights appeared to have come back on. She was so disoriented that she wondered if she had died and was approaching the gates of heaven. Then, her reason flitting in and out, she thought that maybe the generator had kicked in and the building’s electricity had been restored. But then she realized in horror that the light she was seeing was not artificial light but Baghdad’s afternoon sunshine.The corridor ended abruptly and, where there had once been a floor and a ceiling, now only clouds and sunshine were visible above. Unable to grasp what had occurred, she turned around mechanically, retraced her steps, and attempted to enter Vieira de Mello’s office via the office of his secretaries, Manuel and Buenaventura.

  The scene in their shared office was ghastly. The doors were off their hinges. Glass and debris littered the floor and desks. Papers were strewn everywhere. The air conditioners and computer screens had exploded. And a large white bookshelf had toppled onto Buenaventura’s desk. Buenaventura himself had been projected onto Manuel’s desk. He was lying in the fetal position, his eyes were fluttering, and part of his face was missing. Larriera, still uncomprehending, quickly moved into the next office, the last small room before Vieira de Mello’s. There she saw that Hooper, who was wearing a red and white checkered shirt, had pulled his swivel office chair around to the side of his desk to be closer to a person visiting him. He was leaning over in that chair, and his spine seemed unnaturally extended. The visitor, whom Larriera could not identify, turned out to be Jean-Sélim Kanaan, the French-Egyptian political officer who had returned to Baghdad the previous evening after spending a month in Geneva with his newborn son. Kanaan, who had slipped into the office just after Ali left Hooper, sat with his legs crossed in a chair. Both men were sitting in stillness and were covered in white dust. They appeared to have been crushed by beams that had fallen from the collapsed ceiling.

  At the sight of these casualties, the scale of the devastation struck Larriera for the first time. She stopped calling out to Vieira de Mello softly and began screaming, "SERGIO!” But the passage in front of her was blocked by the beams and rubble piled high, and he did not answer. She turned around, exited into the corridor, and resumed her previous effort to find Vieira de Mello’s office side door. This time, when the corridor ended, she looked more carefully into the pit of rubble below. There, for the first time, she saw movement. A man covered in dust was lying on his back thirty feet below, and miraculously, he was blinking and waving his arms like a snow angel. The person below seemed too tall to be Vieira de Mello, but she thought he might be down there as well. She considered jumping into the mangled rubble, but the drop was so high that she thought she might kill both herself and the injured man. She sprinted down the corridor away from the destruction in search of Ronnie Stokes, the head of administration. Less than a minute had passed since the explosion.

  The floors and beams beneath Vieira de Mello’s office had exploded upward and then crashed down. Thus his third-floor office had effectively become the first floor. The ceiling of his office and the roof of the Canal had remained largely intact, but they had collapsed diagonally. Anybody who had been on the southwest side of the building at the time of the explosion lay beneath couches, desks, computers, air conditioners, large slabs of glass from the shattered windows, and beams and concrete from the walls of the building itself.

  Manuel was still blinded. As she staggered toward the stairs on the third floor, she bumped into Pichon, who had regained consciousness. He told her to get out of the building and ran past her into the office Larriera had just vacated. He came to the same devastating realization that Larriera had just reached. “There is nothing here,” he said to himself.

  Ghassan Salamé,Vieira de Mello’s Lebanese political adviser, had been in his office meeting with the brother of the first former regime official the Coalition had arrested. Salamé rushed from his o
ffice to the third floor, where he joined Pichon. When he shouted out to his boss, he heard nothing back, but at the base of the rubble viewed from the corridor, he saw what Larriera had seen: a man whose entire body was covered in white dust except for his eyes, which seemed to be blinking furiously. The man waved. Salamé thought that it was Vieira de Mello. “Courage, Sergio, nous venons te sauver!” he shouted. “Let’s get to him from the back of the building,” he said to Pichon.

  As Larriera rushed away from the wreckage in search of the head of administration, she saw Rishmawi, who was bleeding badly. “I can’t see,” Rishmawi cried. “I think I lost my eye.” Larriera escorted her down a flight of stairs, which were shaking and covered in dust, glass, blood, shoes, pieces of clothing, and office paper. On the second floor Rishmawi’s husband, Andrew Clapham, a legal consultant with the mission, emerged from his office, and the couple was reunited. Larriera sprinted back up the stairs. “I need to find Sergio,” she said. “Don’t, Carolina!” Rishmawi shouted. “The building is going to collapse!”

  Manuel still didn’t know what was happening. She tried to feel her way down the corridor, and as she did, she felt the crunch of unnatural debris beneath her feet. She had begun hearing screams and commands ringing throughout the building, which meant that she was not the only one who had been hurt. She wiped one of her eyes and was able to make out Marwan Ali, who was running in her direction in search of his friend Rick Hooper. She called out to him. “Marwan!” He looked at her blankly, as if he didn’t recognize her. “Marwan, it’s me, Lyn,” she said. His face contorted in horror. “Lyn, my god,” he shouted. “Noooooo.” He was horrified by the sight of her. For the first time Manuel became truly frightened.

  Ali picked up Manuel in his arms and carried her down the two flights of stairs to the front entrance of the Canal Hotel. He laid her down on the cement just outside and made a motion to head back inside. She cried out to him. “No, Marwan, the pavement is too hot!” she said. The cement had gathered the day’s heat and was some 160 degrees. With her one functional eye she looked down at her legs and realized she was barefoot. Her shoes had been blown off her feet. She called out again to Ali, but he had disappeared back inside the building, where many others were trapped.

  Scores of UN officials spilled out of the Canal, passing Manuel on the ground. Many were bleeding profusely from cuts caused by flying glass.Two people had pieces of steel rebar protruding from them, one from his head, another through his shoulder. The aluminum office doors had been converted into stretchers.

  Kuhner, the army reservist from New York in charge of the 812th Military Police, had 9/11 on his mind. He was worried about the New York police officers and firemen on his team. Two of them had already broken down. As they rushed toward the building, they had stopped suddenly. One walked back the way he had come. “I’m sorry, captain,” he had said. “I can’t.” He was having a flashback to the World Trade Center, where he had lost close friends when the buildings collapsed. The Canal too looked as if it was on the verge of imploding. Kuhner, who had no rescue experience himself, deduced the obvious: Given the size of the slabs of rubble, those trapped underneath would remain pinned there unless engineering and fire rescue equipment could be found.

  Ramiro Lopes da Silva,Vieira de Mello’s deputy, was the UN official responsible for security. He had a piece of glass stuck in his forehead but was fully conscious. Benon Sevan’s desire to smoke a cigar during their 4 p.m. meeting had kept Lopes da Silva away from the side of the building where the blast occurred. He was a longtime humanitarian field worker and not a security expert, but he remembered from UN security briefings that in the event of an explosion outside, UN staff was supposed to move to a large enclosed blue-tiled courtyard. “We were always told, ‘Move in, don’t move out.’ Because out was where we thought any explosion would be.When the explosion happened inside,” he remembers, “we had no plan. We were lost. We didn’t know what to do. If we had ever thought that such an attack could occur, and if we had planned to respond to such level of emergency, the UN would not have been in Baghdad.” He joined other UN staff ducking under collapsed beams to exit the building, climbing over the fallen masonry in the corridor, and holding hands as they made their way down the staircase.

  After exiting the Canal Hotel, Lopes da Silva walked around 250 feet to Tent City, where he and other UN staff had lived temporarily in early

  May, before the Canal reopened. The tents now acquired unexpected functions. One of the tents was converted into a first-aid facility, while another contained a satellite phone on a small table, which became what passed for a UN communications center. Lopes da Silva called Tun Myat, the head of UN security at New York Headquarters, to share information and receive guidance. “Initially,” he remembers, “nothing clicked in me about my colleagues on the third floor, about Sergio.” He assumed that the explosion had injured many but not killed anybody. Around fifteen minutes after the blast, Rishmawi approached him. “Sergio is in the building. What are you doing for Sergio?” Lopes da Silva looked confused, and she grew agitated. “Ramiro, we are in the presence of the greatest army in the world, this is what they do. Call Bremer!” Lopes da Silva left Tent City and returned to the Canal building, venturing around the back to the scene of the explosion for the first time. He saw U.S. soldiers beginning to gather at the site. He knew that the UN had neither the equipment nor the expertise for rescue and recovery efforts, and he assumed, not unreasonably, that the Coalition would have made plans to respond to large-scale attacks on civilian targets. Even though Vieira de Mello was clearly out of commission, Lopes da Silva did not consider himself in charge of the bomb scene.After just a few minutes at the back of the Canal, he returned to Tent City and resumed discussions with New York.

  Back in New York, Tun Myat was not the first to learn of the attack. At 8:32 a.m. (4:32 p.m. Baghdad time) Kevin Kennedy, the former U.S. Marine and senior humanitarian official who had only left Baghdad on July 28, got out of the elevator on the thirty-sixth floor in New York and saw that he had a message on his cell phone. Bob Turner had called him just after the attack. “Car bomb, car bomb, Canal Hotel, Canal Hotel,” Turner had shouted into Kennedy’s voice mailbox. Kennedy called the UN operations room, but they had not yet heard about any bomb. Kennedy next called the thirty-eighth floor so that the secretary-general, who was on vacation with his wife on a small island off the coast of Finland, could be informed. He then sprinted the length of the corridor to find an office with a television set. CNN was showing nothing on the attack, so Kennedy hoped Turner’s message might have overstated the case. But at 9:01 a.m., thirty-three minutes after the blast, Kennedy’s face sank as CNN broadcast a “breaking news” item from Baghdad. UN headquarters in Iraq had been struck by a car bomb.

  Information was spotty. Within minutes of the attack, U.S. soldiers from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment had begun to cordon off the hotel, preventing CNN’s correspondent, Jane Arraf, from reaching the complex. But CNN did have a crew on the scene who at the time of the blast had been filming a press conference on the UN’s de-mining efforts. For the next three hours, as UN staff in Geneva and New York awaited word of their friends and colleagues, Arraf and her CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer became the relayers of bad news.

  In her first commentary, at 9:01 a.m. New York time (5:01 p.m. Baghdad time), Arraf described the Canal’s shattered facade and the Black Hawk medical helicopters circling the building. She explained, inaccurately, that the UN had “beefed up security considerably, particularly in anticipation that someone might try to set off a car bomb.” But “still it was a UN building, and they really did not want to send the message that it was either an armed camp or part of the U.S. military.”

  Arraf did not speculate on casualties, but within half an hour Duraid Isa Mohammed, a CNN translator and producer inside the U.S. cordon, spoke by telephone to CNN and reported that five helicopters had already evacuated casualties from the site. As he spoke, he said he was seeing stretchers carrying
two victims from the building. The U.S. military, he observed, were “not answering any questions to the relatives of those local employees who came over to the scene by now and started asking questions about them. I see many women crying around here, trying to find their sons or husbands.”6 With word of stretchers and distraught families, UN officials glued to their televisions around the world knew that this was no small attack. At around 9:30 a.m. New York time, CNN reported for the first time that Vieira de Mello had been “badly hurt.”7