About that UN Mystery Official #2...
06/30 11:33 AM
... the one who issued a public statement regarding Oil-for-Food on April 18, 2005 saying “I cannot recall a single instance in which I had any contact or discussion on this program with any of the officials responsible.” (see below copy of Maurice Strong’s full statement).
Oil-for-Food has been a puzzle so absorbing, once you get a taste for it, that I have sometimes thought someone ought to make a board game out of it (you’d need a very big board). When the feds issued their initial complaint last year against Tongsun Park, one of the more intriguing riddles involved the identities of two mystery figures described in the narrative only as “high-ranking UN Official #1” and “high-ranking UN Official #2.”
Their names were quickly guessed, but it was not until the state’s cooperating witness Samir Vincent took the stand this week that we had official confirmation. Official #1 was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who during the formative years of Oil-for-Food, from 1992-1996, also held the title of Secretary-General of the U.N.
Official #2 was longtime U.N. eminence Maurice Strong, a Canadian sometimes dubbed an “international man of mystery,” who for decades has traveled and worked in high U.N. circles. And in 1996 — the year that Oil-for-Food finally came together — Strong worked both at the World Bank and as an top adviser to Boutros-Ghali at the U.N. Strong was then snapped up in early 1997 by the newly promoted Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and put to work as the chief architect of the first sweeping round of Annan’s endless revolutions of reform. Strong was kept on as a top adviser by Annan until 2005, stepping aside shortly after it became apparent that he was the “UN Official #2” mentioned in the Park complaint. It turned out — by-the-by— that Strong had also been employing as his U.N. office assistant his own stepdaughter, Kristina Mayo, without declaring the relationship to the U.N.
Among other things, Strong’s 1997 reform plan consolidated the administration of the ad hoc new Oil-for-Food program into a single, entrenched office in the UN Secretariat, which Annan then entrusted to Benon Sevan — since alleged by Volcker to have taken payoffs from Saddam (Sevan, when last seen, this spring, living on full U.N. pension in a penthouse apartment on Cyprus, said he was innocent).
During that same first year of Kofi Annan’s reign, 1997, which was also the first full year of Oil-for-Food, Maurice Strong received a check from Tongsun Park for $988,885, which according to Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized inquiry was bankrolled by Saddam. When Volcker’s investigators asked Strong last year about this six-figure check, Strong at first said he did not remember it. When Volcker’s investigators then waved a copy under his nose, complete with his own signature, Strong recovered his memory, but said it was payment for a normal commercial investment that Park had wished to make in a Strong family oil company, and that he had not known the money came from Saddam. Volcker commented wryly in his September, 2005 report that the U.N. needed a “more rigorous disclosure process for conflicts of interest,” but let Strong off with just that rap on the knuckles. (For more on this, here’s a link to ”Strong Implications” from NRO this past January.)
We may learn more about all this at the trial very soon, possibly even today, as the prosecutors work their way toward that $988,885 check, produced by Park after traveling to Baghdad and then driving out to Jordan with $1 million cash in a cardboard box, according to the Volcker version.
For now, I am trying to square Maurice Strong’s 2005 denial of any contact with “any of the officials responsible” for Oil-for-Food with testimony from state’s witness Samir Vincent on Thursday, in which Vincent described a lunch meeting at a Chinese restaurant near the U.N.. This lunch took place in late 1996. At the time, Oil-for-Food was just getting underway, and according to Vincent, the Iraqis had decided not to bother paying Tongsun Park millions of dollars promised to him earlier that year. Park was “very unhappy,” according to Vincent’s testimony, and arranged a high-powered lunch, in a private room, to which he invited three others: Samir Vincent; Iraq’s then-ambassador to the U.N., Nizar Hamdoon; and one of Park’s high-powered friends at the U.N., Maurice Strong, who dropped by for about 45 minutes to exchange pleasantries, but having put in an appearance, left before the lunch was over.
Vincent testified Thursday that after Strong left the lunch, Tongsun Park turned to Iraq’s ambassador Hamdoon and “told him now you see my commitment, now you see why I need Iraq to keep their commitment to me and to continue what they promised to do.”
Statement by Maurice F. Strong
06/30 07:48 AM
In response to questions raised concerning my relationship with Mr. Tongsun Park and allegations to his role in respect of the United Nation’s Iraqi oil-for-food program I want to make clear that:
- Having served UN Secretaries-General since 1970 in several advisory and executive capacities I have had no involvement or connection whatsoever with the UN’s Iraqi oil-for-food program or any other of its Iraqi activities. Indeed I cannot recall a single instance in which I had any contact or discussion on the program with any of the officials responsible. - In 1997, Mr. Park invested on a normal commercial basis in an energy company with which I was associated that had no relationship with Iraq. - I have continued to maintain a relationship with Mr. Park. Indeed, as a native of North Korea he has advised me on North Korean issues in my role as UN Envoy. - I will make myself available to both the Volcker Commission and the US Attorney’s Office to provide any further information which would assist in the expeditious resolution of this matter so as to have this cloud removed as soon as possible.
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More to Come
06/30 02:05 AM
Testimony resumes (at a more decent hour) on Friday.
More Vincent
06/30 02:04 AM
On Thursday, Samir Vincent also described to the jury, as follows, a conversation he says he had in early 1996 with Iraq’s then-ambassador to the U.N., Nizar Hamdoon, in which Vincent said Park could help close a U.N.-Iraq deal to set Oil-for-Food in motion, but “he requires some funds to cover expenses that he had incurred on behalf of Iraq, as well as take care of some people.”
“He said, how much did he ask for?”
“And I said $10 million.”
Hamdoon “went ooph.” Then he said, “I guess he has to take care of B.B.”
“B.B. is Boutros Boutros-Ghali.”
THE MISTY ORIGINS
06/30 02:04 AM
But first, a quick bit of background. When I began writing about Oil-for-Food, almost four years ago, I knew next to nothing about the inner workings of the United Nations. I didn’t know the players. I had never been to a U.N. briefing. It was September, 2002, and the U.N. debate over removing Saddam Hussein had just turned hot. I was trying to understand the workings of the U.N.-sanctioned Iraqi economy, which seemed to consist of almost nothing but Oil-for-Food. I began making some phone calls to ask how the program actually worked.
As soon as I found someone able and willing to describe the basic design — the secrecy, the latitude given to Saddam, the percentage cut of Saddam’s oil money for U.N. expenses — it was clear that the program had to be corrupt. Had Saddam himself set out to design a program open to manipulation, it was hard to imagine how he could have improved on what the U.N. had set up. But the details were almost completely veiled by U.N. confidentiality, by high-level U.N. diplomacy, by top U.N. management who praised the program, assured the press that it had been “audited to death,” and described it as one of the “most efficient” programs the U.N. had ever run.
By now, thanks to the overthrow of Saddam, and a number of investigations, many details once secret have surfaced. But a great deal still lies hidden, and one of the mysteries not well explained is how the U.N. ever came to design such a program.
What we have been hearing from federal prosecutors, in the trial begun this week in a Manhattan courtroom, has been all about the origins of Oil-for-Food.
And with that, welcome to the blue-carpeted federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, Judge Denny Chin presiding, where prosecutors for the past three days have been presenting their case against 71-year-old Tongsun Park. The trial is expected to last three weeks. There is plenty yet to hear, the defense has not yet begun, and we must presume innocence.
But wow, what a tale the prosecutors have been laying before the jury. (For a summary of the opening, here’s a link to my NRO column on “The U.N.’s Day in Court”).
The chief witness so far for the prosecution has been Samir Vincent, an Iraqi-born American citizen who ran a consulting business called Phoenix International, just outside Washington, D.C., in MacLean, Virginia, and had a habit of staying at the Hotel Mark in New York, near the Iraqi mission to the U.N. During the 1990s, Vincent served as an agent for Saddam’s Iraq, seeking ways to persuade the U.N. to lift sanctions on Baghdad. In January, 2005, Vincent was arrested by the feds, pleaded guilty, and became a cooperating witness. Since Tuesday, Vincent has been on the stand, answering the questions of prosecutor Edward O’Callaghan.
Among the highlights so far has been Vincent’s account of retaining the services of a New York lawyer, Theodore Sorensen — famous as a former speechwriter for President Kennedy — to draft proposals for the nascent Oil-for-Food program, which Vincent says he then relayed to Iraq.
“CASH BY THE BAGFUL”
06/30 02:03 AM
Welcome to the World of Oil-for-Food. The biggest scandal ever to hit the U.N. Arguably the biggest scam in history, in which a U.N. program became a vehicle for a murderous tyrant to scam, skim, and steal billions meant for relief.
And so we come to the trial of Tongsun Park, accused by federal prosecutors of acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein, accused of playing a vital role in a secret “back-channel” network carrying messages and money between Baghdad and the U.N. executive suite. The defense lawyer has compared the prosecution’s case to “a Tom Clancy novel” and says his client is “absolutely not guilty.” The prosecution has accused Park of selling his high-level U.N. access for “cash by the bagful,” and receiving $2.5 million from Iraq for his labors, with Iraq promising millions beyond that.
Cash looms large in this case. During the past three days of testimony by state cooperating witness Samir Vincent, we have heard about cash carried around not only in grocery bags, but in envelopes, canvas diplomatic pouches, a suitcase, a bulging briefcase, cash spread out on a hotel bed, and, at one point, during a trans-Atlantic flight from Germany to Newark airport, at least $420,000 in $100 bills stuffed by a helpful courier into his coat, socks and underwear.
As for the cast of characters, there’s something for everyone. On Monday, during jury selection, the judge read out a list of names of “Individuals who may testify or whose names may come up.” A few highlights from that list (no, Dick Cheney is not going to testify, and John Bolton has not been accused of anything):
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan, Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, Theodore Sorensen, Gillian Sorensen, Maurice Strong, Frank Strong, Kenneth Strong, Kristina Mayo, Theodore Kheel, Jean-Claude Aime, Richard Helms, William E. Timmons, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, Frank Carlucci, Jack Kemp, Oscar Wyatt, John Bolton, James Baker, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole... the list goes on. Some are simply mentioned in passing, or have been described by a witness for the prosecution as approached by Iraq with no luck. Some have figured heavily in the testimony so far. Some have yet to come up. More on this as the trial unfolds ...
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