by Adam LeBor
Sami heard her sharp intake of breath. “What emergency meeting? The SG’s at the residence having dinner with Frank Akerman. They are probably talking about Syria as well, but not with Yael. Not as far as I know. Hold on a moment please. I’ll check.”
Thirty seconds later Roxana was back on the line. “Yael is not there,” she said with the happy certainty of someone who knows her rival is firmly out of the loop. “It’s just the SG and Frank Akerman. What did you want to check?”
Bingo, thought Sami. “Just the month when she started work at the UN. She’s not on the website—I guess because of the kind of work she does.”
“We are working on that, Sami, because as you know we are fully committed to transparency for all our employees. I don’t know where she is, and I cannot give you her mobile number, as I am sure you understand. I’ll get back to you later tonight,” said Roxana, before hanging up.
Now he had the answer he sought. He felt no guilt about deceiving Roxana, who like her predecessors daily tried to feed him any amount of disinformation. But the information brought him no joy, although there was a kind of poetic justice here. In fact, he probably deserved to get stood up.
Each time he’d had to choose between a potential romance with Yael and the demands of his job, the job had won. Last year he had published a story about a memorandum Yael had written to Fareed Hussein, protesting the deal she had been ordered to make with a Hutu warlord wanted for the Rwandan genocide. Jean-Pierre Hakizimani was the ideologue and propaganda mastermind behind the mass slaughter, urging his fellow Hutus to exterminate the Tutsis like “cockroaches.” The UN, wrote Yael, was “allowing him to escape justice for tawdry reasons of realpolitik and commercial interests.”
For several weeks after that Yael would not even talk to Sami. Even so, he could justify that to himself. Yes, he was interested her personally, romantically, but Yael’s memo was an important story and he had to report it. Eventually he had rebuilt their fledging relationship. Then he had stood her up, appearing instead on Al-Jazeera with Najwa. Incredibly, even after that he thought he had managed to fix things. Except, clearly, he had not.
Sami finished the rest of the kubbeh, washing it down with a long swig of beer. He picked up the remote control, switched on the television, and flicked through the channels before settling on a rerun of Sex and the City. Perhaps he could pick up some dating tips. Or maybe it was best to focus on work. That, at least, was going very well. He picked up a DVD from a small pile on the coffee table in front of him. The cover showed African children working underground, under the title Dying for Coltan: How the United Nations Was Almost Hijacked. Sami had produced the documentary with Najwa.
Dying for Coltan revealed how the previous year KZX and the Bonnet Group, had conspired with rogue UN officials and Efrat Global Solutions, the world’s largest private military contractor, to take over the majority supply of the mineral. KZX and the Bonnet Group had agreed to sponsor the UN’s first corporate development zone in eastern Congo. Fareed Hussein and many others, none more than Caroline Masters, at that time the deputy secretary-general and infamous for encouraging privatization of UN operations, had hailed the pilot project as a new model of cooperation between the UN and the private sector. But the actual plan was for Efrat Global Solutions, with the help of Hutu militiamen, to trigger a new ethnic war in Goma that would be a rerun of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. UN peacekeepers would have to be deployed to stop the fighting, and once they were in place KZX and the Bonnet Group could expand the Goma Development Zone across Congo while using the UN peacekeepers to stabilize the situation. Profits for the corporations. A boost to the UN’s budget. A win-win all around. Except, of course, for the people who lived in Congo and mined the coltan.
The film had won several awards and was now a finalist in the Best Documentary category at the Tribeca Film Festival. Several UN and EGS officials had been imprisoned, and the planned merger between KZX and the Bonnet Group was on hold. Menachem Stein, the founder and boss of Efrat Global Solutions, had somehow escaped sanction. Fareed Hussein and Caroline Masters denied all knowledge of the planned war, although Sami and Najwa had heard, from several sources, that there was a sound recording proving Fareed Hussein had been forewarned of the planned slaughter. Such a recording, if it existed, would be the biggest story of their careers. It would certainly be the end of Fareed Hussein’s career.
Sami turned the DVD over within his fingers. The film had severely angered the upper reaches of the UN bureaucracy and several foreign ministries, but that was his job. According to his journalistic idol, H. L. Mencken, a veteran reporter from the golden age of journalism before the Second World War, the relationship between the reporter and the government official should be that of the dog and the lamppost. Mencken’s epithet was not exactly true, especially in a place like the UN where sources were everything. But it was still a useful motto to remember when the lure of being an insider could tempt a reporter into questionable trade-offs.
For now, the thunder had faded away. The far-reaching inquiry promised by the SG had been kicked into the very long grass that sprouted across the UN bureaucracy. The German authorities had closed down a criminal investigation into KZX’s senior executives, and the company was expected to soon float on the New York Stock Exchange. KZX’s relationship with the UN had survived and thrived. The firm had sponsored the UN press corps’ luxurious flight from New York to Turkey, and the official press center at the Istanbul Summit.
Sami put down the DVD and picked up a piece of thick white card, embossed with gold letters.
Mr. Sami Boustani and partner are kindly requested to attend the opening reception of the new KZX School of International Development at Columbia University.
Guest of honor: Fareed Hussein, Secretary General of the United Nations
Cocktails at 7pm. Dinner to follow.
Business attire.
Partner. Who could he take? It would be a glamorous event, even by Manhattan’s exacting standards. He had been musing about asking Yael, although it was perhaps a little early in their fledgling relationship for such a public outing. But that was a theoretical question now, not a practical one.
He put the invitation down and opened the new e-mail.
Subject: Of potential story interest
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
The e-mail had no text, but included an attached JPEG file. He ran them both through his security program and they came up clean. He saved the JPEG to his desktop and clicked on the file. It opened up into a photograph.
He could not stop staring at the picture, all thoughts of dinner and wrecked dates forgotten.
*
Yael watched for a couple of minutes as CNN moved on from Charles Bonnet to Syria, then pressed the red button on the television remote control. The screen clicked off. She did not move, turning Roger Richardson’s report over and over in her mind.
A deal.
She had heard the rumors as well, of back-channel diplomacy in Kigali in 1994 that had resulted in disaster, but had never been able to get any details. Every few weeks she brought up the topic in her conversations with Fareed Hussein. He adopted his now familiar look of pious regret, slowly shook his head—and stonewalled. Now, the CNN report raised more questions than it answered. What exactly was the deal? Whose idea was it? Who had brokered it? And who was the go-between? Yael had operated in the gray area herself for long enough to know there were always cutouts. Usually her, but not in this case. Find the cutout between the UN—no, the DPKO—and Hakizimani—and she could, would, find out why David had died.
Could it be Bonnet? His family certainly had the connections across Africa. She reached into the drawer under the coffee table and pulled out a thick plastic file. Yael had long been suspicious of Bonnet and his family’s business interests in Africa. She had compiled the bundle of printouts on the Bonnet Group from the Internet and several classified databases over several weeks last fa
ll, before the coltan scandal broke. Founded in 1880 by Jean-Claude Bonnet, a miner from Brittany who had found a large gold deposit in what was now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the group had diversified over the decades into logging, silver and copper mining, as well as rare earths. Revenue in the Bonnet Group’s mining division, headquartered in Kinshasa, had more than doubled in the last two years, the Economist reported.
Yael picked up her iPad, opened a new window in her browser, and typed in “un.org.” The pale blue welcome page of the main UN website appeared, with the UN logo—the world encased in two olive branches—in a darker tint. A dark blue band stretched across the screen proclaiming “WELCOME” in each of the organization’s six official languages. Yael clicked on the English word and a new page opened with dozens more links, photographs, and video clips leading to new pages and sections on numerous crises, wars, and general themes such as development and sustainability.
A new banner down one side featured updates about the upcoming UN Sustainability Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, which was to be chaired by Fareed Hussein. The conference was scheduled to start in a week, but so far few A-list attendees had been confirmed apart from President Freshwater. Yael knew most countries were just sending an environment minister, many of them quite junior. She moved the cursor into the search bar and typed “Charles Bonnet.” Bonnet’s UN career had ended in disgrace, but he had worked at the organization for twenty years; the last time she had checked there had been a substantial and detailed biography. She clicked on the GO button. The screen flashed. Then a box appeared:
Your search “Charles Bonnet” did not match any documents. No pages were found containing “Charles Bonnet”
There was no point in adjusting the search parameters. Bonnet had been airbrushed out, at least for now, as his UN history was doubtless being readjusted. But in cyberspace, some things could not be erased.
Yael opened archive.org in a new window. The wayback machine, as it was known, was an archive of the Internet, dating back to some of the first web pages and websites in the early 1990s. But it was much more than a trip down cyber-memory lane for techies and geeks. Wayback kept snapshots of every website, around a dozen days for each month, with a comprehensive search facility. Websites could delete pages, files, even the biographies of former officials who were now an embarrassment or a liability, but they lived on forever, inerasable and untouchable, if you knew where to look.
Yael decided to search un.org when Bonnet was at the height of his UN career, in August 2012, a good couple of years before the coltan scandal broke and before he had been appointed Special Representative for Africa. She settled on May 3 and typed “Charles Bonnet” into the search box. His biography immediately filled the screen. Yael read it through slowly, seeking the snippets of information that might reveal something of significance.
There was nothing, at least as far as she could see. A steady climb up the ladder before being appointed an assistant secretary-general in the Department of Peacekeeping, a position senior enough to merit a coveted corner office. She checked back through 2011, 2010, right back to 2008, when he had first been appointed as an ASG. Then she saw it. A single line that had disappeared from the subsequent biographies.
10
Najwa sat down at her desk, trying to clear a space in the chaos. UN reports, press releases, media advisories, briefing notes from think tanks and analysts, newspapers, and glossy magazines were piled up on every inch of surface space. What there was not was a notebook. Or even a clean sheet of paper. It was ten minutes to nine, and she wanted to write down a few notes on her meeting with Riyad Bakri—and by hand, not electronically—while she still remembered their conversation, before she started digging into the DC bomb and the apparent emergence of a new Middle Eastern terrorist group.
Najwa had worked at the UN for two years, appointed as Al-Jazeera’s first female bureau chief after stints in Kabul, Jerusalem, and Paris. Born in Rabat, a niece of the King of Morocco, she had gone to school in Geneva and Paris, and then studied at Oxford and at Yale, where she had caused a minor scandal by modeling swimwear for a French designer. Najwa had no trouble cultivating sources. UN officials and most diplomats were often flattered to be courted, especially by attractive female journalists, and were usually ready to talk—especially over lunch or dinner in one of several excellent restaurants located in the building. Those seeking privacy could retire to one of the many eateries nearby, or one of the more obscure cafés dotted around the complex.
She picked up that week’s edition of Security Council Insider and glanced underneath to find a half-empty packet of chewing gum. She took out a stick, unwrapped it, and began to chew as she flicked through the newsletter, temporarily distracted by its promise of “Exclusive UN insider access and information.” Security Council Insider was a subscription-only publication that cost $500 a year. Its stories were written in a gossipy style and were usually anonymously sourced to “UN insiders,” “a confidential contact,” or via the passive construction “SCI understands.” But they were almost always accurate. SCI was published by a company that Najwa knew was owned by the cousin of an assistant secretary general, who dealt with the Security Council, in the Department for Political Affairs. High-level confidential information, for which the ASG was the obvious source, routinely appeared in the newsletter, but nobody had bothered to make the link. Or, if they had, to do anything about it. Najwa had toyed with doing a story on UN officials privately profiting from their public roles, but some of them were also her best sources. So that idea was on the back burner, at least for now.
This issue included an article that she had been meaning to read on the Reykjavik Sustainability Conference. Najwa had never been to Iceland, nor did she plan to visit. The very word ice was enough to put her off. She wasn’t that interested in sustainability, either, but she read through the story to the end.
And watch that Icelandic time-table. SCI understands that there are several hours between the closure of the conference and the SG’s flight home. We were unable to obtain President Freshwater’s schedule, but we do know that both she and Fareed Hussein enjoy a walk on the beach. And Reykjavik has plenty of those, even if they are kind of wind-blown.
We suggest a stroll along the seafront to Hofoi, the lovely white house where Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev held a summit back in 1986. That meeting was the start of the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Or maybe along the peninsula to Bessastadir, the beautiful but isolated presidential residence. Nowadays, of course, it’s the conflict between the United States and Iran that has us all worried. Which is why we were pleased to hear that President Kermanzade might be enjoying some Atlantic air as well.
Najwa drew a red ring around the final couple of paragraphs. She had not known Kermanzade was going to Reykjavik. There was no way to check for sure, but SCI valued its $500-a-year subscribers and had never been wrong yet. The SCI story was probably enough to sway Najwa. Just a snatched appearance of the three leaders together would be enough to justify the trip.
A former academic at Tehran University who specialized in modern Iranian film before becoming the first female minister of education, Kermanzade had won a surprise victory in the recent presidential election. Iran was changing, and with 40 percent of the population under thirty-five, its citizens were chafing at the mullahs’ restrictions. Not only was Kermanzade a woman, she was also a reformer elected on a platform of easing some of the restrictions of Sharia law, and reducing what she called Iran’s “foreign commitments”—shorthand for cutting back support for Shia militias in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon—and thawing relations with both the “Great Satan,” the United States, and the “Little Satan,” Great Britain. There was even talk of opening relations with Israel. Her win had sent the conservatives and hard-liners into a frenzy. Most analysts predicted Kermanzade would resign—or worse—by the end of the year.
But could the logistics work? It was short notice to plan a trip across t
he Atlantic. Najwa glanced at her watch. Tomorrow night was the Friday reception for the launch of the KZX Development School at Columbia University. The Sustainability Conference was due to start on Sunday morning. President Freshwater and her Iranian counterpart were due to speak on Monday, so she needed to get to Reykjavik by early Monday morning with her crew. That meant an overnight flight. There was bound to be a UN travel facility for the press, but she needed to check before she booked seats. By the time she and Sami had realized that the airplane to the Istanbul Summit was a KZX company freebie they were on board and about to take off. KZX would almost certainly sponsor the press airplane to Reykjavik, to dovetail nicely with its new partnership with Columbia University, and neither she nor Sami could accept such a free ride again. So they needed to fly commercial.
Najwa glanced around her office, in her mind already planning her trip. Precious real estate in the Secretariat Building was allocated along strict principles: media from Western countries, especially those that dug deep into UN corruption, such as the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Financial Times, were granted miserly cubicles, often with no windows. Media from the developing world were given spacious offices, none more coveted than that of the Al-Jazeera bureau. Najwa and her team had three large, bright rooms. The main space was used by Najwa, the second by Maria, and the third housed an editing suite.
The white walls were decorated with framed photographs of stills from Najwa’s coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings. Each staffer had a teak and steel height-adjustable workstation, with a mesh-backed office chair sprouting levers and buttons that demanded a degree in engineering to adjust. A brushed steel coffee machine stood in one corner, while the facing wall was covered with four flat LED television screens. A shelf was filled with a clutter of prizes that Najwa and her team had won for their reporting.
Najwa turned over the SCI newsletter and began to write on the back.
