Lore Stories: Reflecting on a Tale of Massive Global Corruption

Twenty years after revealing some of the extent of the corruption of Iraq's humanitarian relief program, there is a different way to think about things.

Twenty years ago, I was a capital markets journalist reporting mostly about mining equities and metal prices. On a dreary spring day in 2004, I rendezvoused at a clandestine meeting in a coffee shop in Chelsea, NYC, having taken an early train to the city from Princeton Junction, NJ. An intermediary for a primary source handed me a thick envelope. It was a brief interaction because I was only interested in opening the envelope to confirm the source’s story.

A few weeks before, the source and intermediary had lunch with me in Midtown East in the shadow of the United Nations (UN) headquarters. They asked me if I was interested in a story about fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption at the UN. “Of course”, I responded without any hesitation.

So, I came to possess that fat envelope. I found a seat alone on the train and used the hour-or-so trip back to Princeton to read everything. It was more than they had promised. Page after page of internal UN documents scraped away some of the layers of what could only be described as a global crime syndicate that used the organization’s activities and institutions as cover for multiple rackets.

Those documents proved what had been suspected for a while—the UN Oil-For-Food (OFF) program was thoroughly corrupted. The documents became the central pillar of proof about the fleecing of the UN-supervised humanitarian relief program in Iraq and was ultimately consequential in forcing an investigation. It reverberated through interlocking global and national elites; however, the consequences for most involved had more to do with temporary personal embarrassment than prolonged prosecutions and reparations.

Going Global

The publication I worked for, MineWeb.com, punched well above its weight in mining industry reporting, but it could never generate the coverage needed to expose what was in the envelope. I gambled and called the Wall Street Journal’s Claudia Rosett to suggest we collaborate - I would give her copies of all the documents if she promised not to pirate the story from me and MineWeb. She was true to her word.

After independent fact-checking and sourcing by Claudia and her editors, the extent of the Oil-For-Food corruption story broke simultaneously in MineWeb.com and the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, May 19, 2004, followed by a Fox News story on May 20. Interestingly, only the Heritage Foundation has an accurate reference to the sourcing.

Connecting with Claudia was the right decision. I got five minutes in the spotlight, and then Claudia easily eclipsed me with her superior reporting talents, better sources, and robust distribution network. Claudia went on to earn many deserved plaudits and awards for reporting the scandal’s endless depths. She was a brilliant and tenacious old-school journalist. May she rest in peace after passing away relatively young last May.

I went back to plebeian reporting on the mining industry. I did very little else about the UN, in part because I was responsible for a very young family with a baby on the way, and we were still relatively new immigrants without US citizenship. Many characters and organizations in the story were sinister or had menacing connections.

Early Days

In the two decades since I placed the leaked audit documents into public view, I now understand Oil-For-Food differently than Claudia and I initially presented. Let’s rewind the clock before getting there to better set the context.

I fell into journalism by chance when I worked for The Sunday Times of South Africa as the first “Internet Editor.” Hired in January 1997 by Editor Brian Pottinger, I was responsible for putting the then-largest circulation Sunday weekly onto the still relatively new “World Wide Web.”

I learned about the Internet at my previous job with the Chamber of Mines of South Africa (CoM - now the Minerals Council), where my boss, Tom Main, kindly tolerated my interest in information systems. He signed off on contracting for one of the first high-speed lines in the country and left me alone to tinker and build one of the earliest corporate websites. That site was a hat tip to an earlier network - the “bullion” in bullion.org was the CoM’s old Telex identity.

I loved the news environment and discovered I could get paid for writing, especially from the more news-hungry business section edited by Sven Lunsche. That evolved into a news-focused role as the founding editor of I-Net Bridge’s netAssets.com masterminded by Roy Isacowitz. It was an incredibly popular daily news digest for the South African business market. It was a prototype for what Axios is now known for - bullet point summaries and need-to-know news prioritization for busy people.

During this period, I was “bumped” by an individual from the American Embassy in Pretoria. He would later emerge as a central figure in the 2001 Hainan Island incident when a US Navy spy plane was forced down after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. In other words, he wasn’t some low-level State Department flunky who whiled away his assignment in South Africa buying Cappuccini for amateur reporters.

Soon after the initial contact with the Embassy representative, Uncle Sam provided an all-expenses-paid junket to Austria. It was ostensibly a cross-cultural/global citizen program with an apparent pro-America bias, but it was a peculiar setup, to be sure.

It’s not unusual for journalists to attract foreign government attention for many reasons. I assume my number came up because I broke a story that got few reads and zero traction. I was passed information from a well-placed source that North Korean agents had been officially, but covertly, hosted in South Africa and had inspected and removed items from the Pelindaba nuclear research facility.

At the time, I was working for Moneyweb.co.za, a new media rocket launched in the waning days of the dot-com era. Media savant Alec Hogg poached me from I-Net Bridge in 1998 as his first employee and kindly allowed me to stay with the company after the family won Green Cards in the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery, which is how we ended up in New Jersey in late 2000.

Strange Liaisons

Because of the "bump," I remain a little leery of how I came to possess an envelope filled with official UN audit documents scratching just the surface of a vast multi-decade criminal enterprise.

The source’s motivations for leaking the documents are as old as mankind’s first grudge, but the intermediary remains mysterious. Indeed, the global mining industry provides excellent cover for spooks living in the shadowlands of regular and irregular activities, and I am sure I know at least three of them.

Was I the means to get the documents into the news cycle? I doubt it because it would have been simpler to give the packet to any number of journalists who have been on the side hustle payroll of assorted agencies and embedded in more prestigious outlets than a scrappy Internet publication.

Adding to my suspicion is that the story's actual genesis was a January 2004 report in the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada listing 270 individuals and entities participating in Iraqi bribery schemes. I received the UN documents a few months later, adding a definitive factual layer to the story consistent with how “narrative news” is developed and distributed. Some coincidences are not coincidental.

It is important to remember the larger context into which the oil-for-food scandal broke open. The Iraq War had gone from “Mission Accomplished” triumphalism to an indisputable quagmire, especially with the leaking of the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture photos. Indeed, on the very same day that the OFF scandal documents emerged, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had issued a humiliating admission that the global brain-trust for the war had somehow failed to anticipate an insurgency in Iraq.

My reporting on the scandal was focused on malfeasance. I wanted people to understand how many tens of billions of dollars were in play between pinstripe global corporations, UN layabouts, and assorted national crime gangs. My overall pitch was that former Iraq President Saddam Hussein had hoodwinked the world by illicitly selling oil right under the wings of the no-fly zone enforcers.

That is not where the rest of the reporting ran. Mark Levin interviewed me on his show on WABC on the evening of May 25, 2004, and the interaction reduced the information to Saddam pulling wool over naive American eyes.

The day after the story broke in 2004, I was invited to Fox News Studios in Manhattan for a taped interview. I won’t name the on-screen interviewing journalist, but he is still with Fox News and in a much more senior role. He had one mission: to make me say on camera that UN boss Kofi Annan’s fingerprints were all over the OFF and other scandals. I balked at the repeated attempts, and the interview was cut short and never aired. In fairness to him, my cheap blazer and radio face didn’t help, but I came away with the impression that he was working off talking points.

Claudia’s reporting ran along the same rails, which is understandable because her media affiliations were with organizations sympathetic to the GWOT narrative. Given the Bush administration’s desire to make the UN more pliant and less critical of the war and to provide an alternative news cycle to the disaster building in Iraq, it was clear that the story was being shaped to put wind in the sails of the pro-war camp and create some convenient villains for the public to despise.

Just as curiously, while sailing with a friend off Island Beach State Park, I received a call from a US Senate staffer who said I should expect to testify about the leaked documents to House and Senate committees. The appearance never happened.

To this day, the narrative about the scandal is that Saddam Hussein was cleverly filching oil to enrich his family and a few cronies. The truth is that leading international corporations, political parties, government agencies, NGOs, and various principals of the hoi oligos were neck-deep in systemic theft and bribery under the UN’s patronage. Indeed, my evidence shows the vast corruption of multiple UN peacekeeping missions that have stretched back many decades. It was ignored in favor of the anti-Annan narrative.

Volcker Report

The UN eventually appointed Paul Volcker to chair an “independent” investigation. His October 2005 report confirmed all the initial reporting and added some juicy transparency.

However, it was indefensibly secretive, and the supposed independence was nominal. The most remarkable outcome of the OFF scandal is how few individuals and entities faced any consequences. "Too big to prosecute" is as accurate as "too big to fail."

Two decades later, my understanding of OFF has matured with the benefit of hindsight and comparison with other major international and national corruptions.

Saddam Hussein did not outwit anyone. Every single barrel of oil that went through the scheme to the tune of some $70 billion ($116 billion in today's money) was lifted with the full faith and credit of the nations sanctioning Iraq as well as their UN satraps. It was one of the most enormous and disgusting pig-feeding troughs in history. There are many more such troughs in operation today.