Twenty

REBUFFED

The first gathering of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad, July 13, 2003.

“LIKE A VICTORIAN PARLOR MAID”

After Vieira de Mello helped Bremer with the formation of the Governing Council, his influence diminished and his renowned political instincts let him down.The Coalition had relied on him in late June because he brought expertise on political transitions and because he had familiarity and credibility with a variety of Iraqi political and religious forces. But paradoxically, by serving as a talent spotter, he had made himself dispensable. Once Bremer was able to work directly with the Governing Council, he had less need for a UN intermediary. Similarly, prominent Iraqis who had previously used Vieira de Mello to convey their views to Bremer found it easier to negotiate directly with the Americans.

Vieira de Mello was sad to see Ryan Crocker and British ambassador John Sawers leave Baghdad at the end of July. Bremer was surrounding himself with advisers who seemed more hostile to the UN. Vieira de Mello told one visitor that “the more neocon side of Jerry’s personality” was emerging.¹

While in New York, after briefing the Security Council, he had turned up in the office of his colleague Kieran Prendergast and plopped down on Prendergast’s couch. “My god,” he had said, “I need a drink.” He and Prendergast were not friends, but the two men had worked together more closely while he was in Iraq than they had before. Prendergast produced a bottle of Mongolian vodka with golden flecks inside that an aide had brought back from a recent trip. “That looks awful,” Vieira de Mello said, “but it will do.” After taking several swigs of the spirit, he said that the Americans and Iraqis were already showing signs of losing interest in UN help. Then sure enough, as soon as he got back to Baghdad, the Iraqis on the Governing Council began prevaricating and delaying when he tried to meet with them. They told him that he was welcome to join them after an upcoming lunch with Bremer, while coffee was being served.“He was like a Victorian parlor maid,” recalls Prendergast. “Seduced and discarded.”

Vieira de Mello had hoped the Iraqis on the Governing Council would rise to the occasion and actually govern by exercising the limited authority they had been given. But they were doing the opposite, spending most of their time squabbling. He suggested the council would be better off if it were funded by the UN (rather than the United States and the U.K.) and if it received assistance from UN technical advisers. But Iraqi council members were not interested. He wrote to Headquarters that their behavior did “not indicate a particular willingness for compromise.”² They seemed woefully out of touch with ordinary Iraqis and were operating, he complained, “in a kind of cocoon.”³

But if the choice was between absolute U.S. rule and flawed Iraqi rule, Vieira de Mello would take the Governing Council. To persuade Iraq’s neighbors to give the council “the benefit of the doubt,” he went on a whirlwind tour of the region. On a trip to Turkey, he met with the Turkish and Indian foreign ministers. He visited Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. More than three years before the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton) would urge the Bush administration to enlist Iraq’s neighbors, he tried to do so, flying to Damascus and Tehran to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and President Mohammad Khatami. In Amman he met with the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan. And in Egypt he met with Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League.

Vieira de Mello knew he was a more palatable salesman than any American and than certain members of the Governing Council itself. Nonetheless he had to be careful not to come across as a handmaiden to the occupation. When Arab journalists quizzed him as to whether the UN was there as “just a cover to the American invasion,” his temper flared: “The UN, its secretary-general, and the SRSG [Special Representative of the Secretary-General] are no tool and no cover for anyone. We are an independent organization. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and myself are independent from anyone. So do not suggest for any second that we are there supporting the United States or the Coalition.”⁴ He rejected the charge that the Governing Council had been “handpicked” by the Americans. In fact, he insisted, the council was “as representative an institution of governance as one could imagine in the Iraq of today.” Those Arab governments that faulted the Governing Council because it had not been elected, he wrote in a draft op-ed he hoped to publish in the region, “should be prepared to promote the same principle in their domestic constituencies.”⁵ He convinced himself that he was making progress, as several Arab governments said that they were prepared to support the council if the occupiers really let it govern.

His sales tour alarmed his staff in Baghdad and friends around the world who read about it. An August 2003 Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Iraqis thought that the policies of the Governing Council were “mostly determined” by the United States and the U.K., while only 16 percent deemed the body “fairly independent.”⁶ “Here you had Sergio in public saying, ‘I helped create this Governing Council. I support this Governing Council,’ ” recalls Ramiro Lopes da Silva, his deputy in Baghdad. “And then the Governing Council did not really attempt to represent the concerns of the Iraqi population, as the members were probably more concerned with themselves. How did that make the UN look?” Timur Goksel, who was still spokesman for the UN in Lebanon some two decades after he had worked with Vieira de Mello in Naqoura, was shocked to hear Vieira de Mello’s defense of the council on Arab television. “I thought maybe he felt a bit too secure in Iraq,” Goksel recalls. “I thought something was going wrong. He dressed like an administrator. He talked like an administrator. He looked like one of them.” Goksel sent an e-mail to his friend urging him to break away from the formal structures and do as they had done in Lebanon. “Go to the coffee shops, Sergio,” he recalls writing. “Reach out to the men with the guns.” Omar Bakhet got in touch with Vieira de Mello to deliver the same message. Bakhet appealed to him to “stop trying to carve out a political role for yourself. No one in the Middle East is innocent.”

But Vieira de Mello had invested too much to give up on the nascent council. Despite the evidence he saw daily, he told himself it would eventually succeed. “I wouldn’t be touring countries in the region trying to sell the Governing Council if I didn’t believe what I’m saying,” he told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The last thing I need and the organization needs is to be marketing the interests of the United States.”⁷

But the Iraqi political landscape was changing in ways that he did not appreciate. Moqtada al-Sadr and other militants were gaining clout because they were delivering social services and physical security that the Coalition was not. While Vieira de Mello was selling the council in July, al-Sadr had taken to demanding its dissolution. He said that the Hawza, or the Shiite religious authority, should run Iraq, and on July 25 he gathered tens of thousands of Shiites in Najaf to show his strength and urge an end of the occupation. “The Iraqi Governing Council was set up by the Americans, and it must be disbanded,” al-Sadr told his followers.⁸

Vieira de Mello knew that in the three key areas where the Coalition was foundering—power sharing, policing, and economic development—the UN had made grave mistakes but had amassed unique expertise.Yet, to his amazement, the Coalition seemed uninterested in tapping it. On the law-and-order side, he liked to repeat what he had learned through years of frustration: “Soldiers make bad policemen.”Although the UN had trained local policemen in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the Coalition did not request its assistance. Instead, the CPA gave a $50 million contract to DynCorp International, which was originally supposed to send six thousand trainers, but which eventually set just five hundred. One police chief from North Carolina, Jon Villanova, was given a staff of forty to train twenty thousand Iraqi policemen.⁹ Electricity, water, and other utilities operated intermittently at best, lagging far behind public expectations. Vieira de Mello reminded Bremer that much of Kosovo and all of East Timor had been burned to the ground when the UN arrived, but the UN administrations had eventually managed to mobilize the resources needed for recovery. Still, Bremer seemed unreceptive to UN advice. “We could have helped,” Vieira de Mello told Packer in August. “We still can,” he said. “There’s still time.”¹⁰

The one issue on which Vieira de Mello and Bremer clashed heatedly was the rights of detainees in U.S. custody. In Cambodia, Congo, and East Timor,Vieira de Mello had feuded with his friend Dennis McNamara over human rights issues. But in Iraq he behaved like the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that he had reluctantly become. He talked constantly of “bringing the high commissioner’s post to the field.” He behaved as though he had acquired a new pride in, and perhaps a new understanding of, his Geneva job, as he saw that violations of human rights were the cornerstone of all that had been wrong with Saddam Hussein’s reign and all that could go wrong under the Coalition. “The moment we landed in Iraq,” recalls Mona Rishmawi, a UN human rights adviser, “he was a different man.” “Some people think that human rights are the UN’s soft underbelly,” he told aides. “But Iraqis know that human rights conditions will make or break Iraq.”

On July 15, 2003, he and Bremer were scheduled to discuss detainees. Sawers had counseled him to raise any concerns about excessive use of U.S. military force or prison conditions, not by criticizing but instead by asking Bremer, “How will you deal with criticisms?”¹¹ It was the only meeting in the Green Zone from which Bremer insisted on barring Prentice and Salamé. Vieira de Mello inquired about the conditions of the thousands of prisoners at the Baghdad airport who were crammed into inhumane facilities. He stressed the importance of creating a database for Iraqis in detention, and just as he had done with President Bush in March, he asked that family members and lawyers be granted access to the detainees. He urged that the detention period be reduced from twenty-one days to seventy-two hours, that status review be instituted, and that something like a public defender system be created. “I’m not accusing your soldiers of abuse,” he told Bremer. “I’m saying you don’t have the checks and balances in place to guard against abuse.” Bremer said he undertood the UN position but felt that it was being unjustly biased by “the Palestinian on your staff.” He was referring to Rishmawi, who carried a Jordanian passport but was of Palestinian descent and at recent international gatherings had been critical of U.S. detention practices. Vieira de Mello defended Rishmawi, who accompanied him to the meeting and was waiting outside. He argued that the Coalition was harming its own cause with its reckless approach to detainee issues. Nearly a year passed before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, forcing Bremer to address Rishmawi’s criticisms on the merits. Vieira de Mello was the first international official to warn Bremer of the potential for grave abuse and national embarrassment.

At a subsequent meeting with Bremer he brought with him a local newspaper clipping that carried a photo of Iraqis who had been hooded in U.S. detention.“This is incredible,” he said, but Bremer looked confused.“What’s wrong with hooding?” he asked. Knowing that Coalition commander General Ricardo Sanchez and Bremer frequently clashed over their interlocking responsibilities,Vieira de Mello raised detainee practices with Sanchez as well, requesting that the UN be given the right to inspect U.S. prison facilities. Sanchez said he thought such external monitoring unnecessary. "My troops are among the best in the world,” he said.“I want to maintain these standards. I am proud of my troops, and I intend to remain proud of them.”

Throughout his career Vieira de Mello had always liked to be liked. On the issue of detainees, he conveyed all of his complaints to the Americans in private, at no time speaking out publicly. When he pushed for a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison, which the Coalition had renovated and reopened on August 4, he asked Bremer to accompany him.The morning of the visit, he presented Bremer with a cartoon he had cut out of the International Herald Tribune.The cartoon, The Wizard of Id, depicted the king who lived in isolation from his people, inspecting conditions in the dungeon. Entering the dungeon, the king was escorted by a guard into the dining area, where he was shown the types of “swill” from which prisoners could choose: “swill,” “fat-free swill,” “vegetarian swill,” and “kosher swill.” The guard explained: “The human rights people are coming in the morning.” Vieira de Mello convinced himself that his private pressure was paying dividends. He told reporters that a central data bank for detainees was in the works, showers had been built for four hundred of the Iraqis detained in sweltering tents, proper prison buildings would soon replace the tents, and the number of juvenile detainees in Baghdad had dropped from 172 to 30. But however much he hoped for progress, he could not get either Bremer or Sanchez to prioritize the fate of detainees.

The one area on which the Coalition proved amenable to UN help was elections. Vieira de Mello persuaded Carina Perelli, one of his favorite people from UN Headquarters in New York, to lead a delegation to Iraq on August 1. Perelli (a brash, chain-smoking, heavyset ex-revolutionary) and Vieira de Mello (an immaculate, health-obsessed company man) were an unlikely pair. But they had come to respect and even adore each other while managing East Timor’s elections. In Baghdad they completed each other’s sentences in the office and bantered to ease the tension. “I need a quickie with you,” Vieira de Mello would say if he saw Perelli in the hallway when he wanted to discuss the election lists.“At my age, I don’t do quickies anymore,” she would answer.

Perelli and her team spent almost three weeks touring Iraq so as to be able to assess whether the UN Electoral Assistance Division could reasonably contribute. Just before leaving Baghdad in mid-August, she drove with Vieira de Mello to the Green Zone for a meeting with Bremer. On the drive there her friend urged her to be straight. “Bremer still sees elections as a technical matter and not a wholly political one,” Vieira de Mello said. “You have to educate him like you educated me . . .The problem with you election people,” he continued, smiling, “is that you are an acquired taste.”

In the meeting Bremer presented his plan: The unelected Governing Council would draft an electoral law, and the Iraqis would ratify the law in a referendum. Perelli disagreed vehemently with the sequencing the Coalition had in mind. “You have to be very careful with referendums in transitions,” she said.“They become public opinion polls, which, on the basis of my conversations with Iraqis, is not in your interest.”²⁷

She left the meeting optimistic that the Coalition would request UN assistance.Vieira de Mello liked to quote Yassir Arafat saying,“Give me a square kilometer, and I’ll control the country.” As Perelli recalls, “We saw we had a window. We knew it was not the front door.” The challenge for the UN would be to figure out how to open the window. Vieira de Mello assured her that he would pull the plug on UN electoral assistance if she came to believe the Americans were sacrificing core principles. Perelli had a different worry: Vieira de Mello, her chief ally in the UN, would be leaving Baghdad in six weeks’ time, and she would be stuck on her own. “If you abandon me,” she said, “I’ll have to deal not only with Bremer but also with whatever jerk they replace you with. I can handle the Americans, but I can’t handle both.” He assured her that he would stand up for her from Geneva. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “This place is getting to me, and I want to start my life with Carolina.”

In previous missions he had helped offset flagging staff morale by making himself available after hours for drinks with close staff. But in Baghdad he socialized only rarely. Larriera had arrived in mid-June, toting the items he had asked her to bring: large stashes of chocolate, his Sony portable stereo, a Discman for his runs, a Brazilian music CD collection, a James Bond Gold DVD collection that she had given him for Christmas, photographs from East Timor, and, for good luck, two small iron Buddha statues that they had bought together in Thailand. He held two wine and cheese parties in his office at the Canal, but he typically hurried home to the drab oasis that he and Larriera had established in their suite at the Cedar Hotel. She was working as an economics officer with the mission, but also preparing to start a master’s program in August. “You study,” he would say when they reached the hotel. “I’ll cook!” And so he did. Before leaving the Canal, the couple would pick up aluminum trays of leftover lunchtime food at the cafeteria, and he would heat them up on a tiny electric burner. Or he would prepare breaded veal, steaks, and potato omelets of his own. The staff grumbled that he was reclusive. Salamé pushed him at least to go out for Friday lunches. But on one occasion when he thought he was having lunch with Salamé alone, he arrived at the restaurant and found a table filled with UN staff. He waited out the meal stiffly and later instructed Salamé, “Next time tell me who’s coming to lunch.” Once Salamé phoned to tell him that he had tracked down an Iraqi book of photographs for him and was leaving it at the hotel reception desk. “No,” Vieira de Mello said, “come up and have a scotch.” Salamé’s room abutted Vieira de Mello’s, yet this was the only occasion that he was invited inside.

NOW A WAR ZONE

The violence was getting worse, and it was wearing everybody out. Soon after Vieira de Mello arrived in June, the insurgents began experimenting with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Initially they left IEDs on the road at night so as to trap U.S. convoys on patrol. But as the weeks had passed, the attacks grew more sophisticated. The bombs were better disguised and more powerful, and were often followed by gunmen shooting from hideouts nearby. The attacks on Coalition forces increased daily. Some 117 attacks occurred in May, 307 in June, and 451 in July.¹² FBI agents had originally come to Iraq to interrogate senior Iraqi detainees at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport. But in the second week of July, FBI agents in Iraq put in a request to headquarters for post-blast bomb gear, such as gloves and swabbing material. None of this equipment had been sent before because the Bush administration had not anticipated the kind of resistance the Coalition was encountering.

Vieira de Mello occupied a spacious third-floor corner office at the back of the Canal Hotel that combined a relaxed living room alcove, a desk area, and a boardroom table to accommodate larger meetings. The windows on one wall looked out onto a seven-foot-wide gravel access road that turned off Canal Road, a main thoroughfare. Across the access road he could see a hospital for patients with spinal injuries. Farther down the road, diagonal from Vieira de Mello’s office, was an Iraqi catering school and the newly established Coalition Civil-Military Operations Center, occupied by two dozen American civil affairs officers attached to the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. The Americans had erected huge sandbags and a ten-foot-high steel gate laced with barbed wire around their quarters. They had also posted guards on the roof of the Canal itself to man a twenty-four-hour, 360-degree observation post.

The access road that ran behind the Canal Hotel was open to public traffic. UN security officials and U.S. military officers with the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment worked to close off the road, which ran very close to the back of the hotel, but senior UN staff were concerned that if the UN began disrupting traffic or blocking the road to the catering school or the spinal hospital, they would alienate Iraqis as the Americans had done when they sealed off the Green Zone.

Rishmawi, the human rights officer, occupied an office on the back side of the building near Vieira de Mello’s. Her desk was positioned such that she had her back up against the window. She found herself worrying that a gunman would position himself atop the neighboring spinal hospital and fire at the back of her head. In late June, when another office opened up down the hall, she leaped for it.Vieira de Mello pretended that he was hurt. “How could you strand me here?” he said. “Aren’t you going to miss the view?” “You see a view,” she answered. “All I see is snipers.” Yet she felt foolish for moving.

The security team based at the Canal was small, never exceeding a half-dozen UN officials. So many UN agencies were jockeying to send staff to Iraq that the team spent more time processing travel requests from New York and Geneva than they did securing UN staff who were already in Iraq. On June 18 Robert Adolph sent Ramiro Lopes da Silva an e-mail complaining of the deluge. “The overwhelming majority of UN staff that are in Iraq should not be here,” Adolph wrote disapprovingly. “The volume of security clearance requests has been staggering. . . . Tired people tend to make more mistakes. Given the current security context, we dare not permit those mistakes to be made.”¹³

The person who was the most vigilant about Vieira de Mello’s personal security was Alain Chergui, the fifty-year-old former French special forces officer who had guarded him in East Timor. In early June Chergui had joined Vieira de Mello in Cyprus and asked Paul Aghadjanian, the UN mission’s chief administrative officer, where he could find the container of security equipment and instructions sent from New York. Aghadjanian had said he knew of no such container. “I was expecting weaponry, ammunition, ballistic vests, night-vision goggles, helmets, trauma kits, GPS, all the equipment mandatory for such a mission,” Chergui remembers. “Plus a map and some notes and and and and . . .” Their first day in Iraq, Adolph had delivered a security briefing to Vieira de Mello and his team that Chergui found condescending. “He said things like ‘Don’t fuck with a guy with a gun,’” he remembers. “I thought, ‘What do they think you should do when there’s a guy with a gun?’ ”

Chergui had worked for the UN in Iraq back in 1998. Even in a Baghdad that was then tyrannical but orderly, he had labored for six months to get waist-high cement barriers erected outside the Canal so that arriving vehicles would be funneled through a chute to a checkpoint. When he had arrived back at the Canal with Vieira de Mello on June 2, he had been stunned to discover that, in a much more deadly environment, only forty-three Iraqi national staff and thirty-eight U.S. soldiers were manning the gates of the premises. “Of the American soldiers, some have to eat, some have to rest, some have to do paperwork,” he said to himself. “How many are actually offering perimeter security?” Then he spotted the concrete barriers he had installed five years before. They were propped up parallel to the perimeter fence, unused.

Chergui was part of Vieira de Mello’s nine-member close protection team. Each member was given only a 9mm pistol. These guns were appropriate for manning the entrance to the UN compound in Geneva but were totally unsuited to a war zone. Chergui pleaded with New York for submachine guns. Seven weeks into his time in Baghdad, the guns finally arrived: hand-me-downs from the UN civilian police in Bosnia. He was relieved, but when he opened the box, he was stunned to see that three of the seven guns lacked the pins required to fire. “It’s like giving somebody the present of a pen without ink,” he says.

When Chergui saw Vieira de Mello’s corner office, he was aghast. Looking out the office window, he could peer into the nearby spinal hospital and see a mosque in the distance. Concerned mainly about snipers, he asked the head of the close protection team to look into moving the office. But when he presented the idea to Vieira de Mello, his boss vetoed the move.The Canal was overcrowded with staff, and he said he did not want to ask his staff to bear risks that he would not.

Later in the month two of Vieira de Mello’s other French bodyguards took security matters into their own hands, borrowing several AK-47s from the French embassy. Since the UN in New York would never have approved these weapons, Vieira de Mello had personally given the go-ahead. In the morning as they left the hotel, he would often ask whether “Santa Claus” (his nickname for the guns) was joining them. One day while Perelli was in the car, Gaby Pichon, a French bodyguard, confessed to his boss, “We need training.”Vieira de Mello teased, “Just hand the gun to Carina—she’ll show you how to use it.”

While UN security officials grew alarmed about the escalating violence, U.S. officials sounded oddly unworried. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was asked why he was reluctant to characterize the Iraqi rebellion as a “guerrilla war.” “I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war,’ ” he said, “is because there isn’t one.”¹⁴ The resistance was coming from “deadenders” who would be quashed.¹⁵ In Baghdad, U.S. officials all sang from the same hymnbook. Paul Bremer told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson on August 7, “More people get killed in New York every night than get killed in Baghdad.”¹⁶

Though fewer than a dozen attacks occurred each day—a relatively small number when compared to 2007, when there would be 163 daily attacks by insurgents and militia—UN officials understood that circumstances had changed.¹⁷ The UN’s June Threat Assessment, dated June 29 and written by Adolph, noted: “To date there have been no direct assaults on UN staff or facilities, but it is the consensus of the UN-Iraq Security Team that it is only a matter of time.”¹⁸ In a June 30 meeting of UN officials with security responsibilities, Kevin Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine who worked on logistics and humanitarian affairs, told staff, “The situation has changed. This is now a war zone.” Kennedy ordered three bomb shelters to be built for some two hundred people.¹⁹When a World Food Program warehouse and IOM office in Mosul were hit with grenades, Vieira de Mello sent a note to Bremer on July 6 that attached a rough translation of a leaflet “against religious enemies” that had been distributed around a nearby mosque prior to the attack .²⁰

Kennedy and Vieira de Mello discussed the deluge of staff that UN agencies were irresponsibly sending to Iraq. Whatever the political pressures and funding opportunities, they needed to stay away until the risks abated. “People are coming to Baghdad and treating it like they’re making a trip to Geneva,” Kennedy said. A few days later, as the two men waited together at Baghdad airport for a flight out, they watched a motley crew of foreigners working for the UN and other humanitarian agencies emerge from a plane. “What the hell are all these people doing here?” Vieira de Mello asked. He dubbed the inessential personnel who flocked to the city “the tourists.”

At a meeting of the UN Security Management Team in Baghdad on July 12, UN security staff updated attendees on the status of previous security recommendations. Adolph’s notes on the meeting read as follows:

Cease the influx of incoming staff . . . NOT ACHIEVED

Reduce the numbers of staff . . . NOT ACHIEVED²¹

As the attacks on the Coalition continued, UN security officers tried to curtail the mobility of UN staff. Curfews were imposed, and travel without a two-vehicle escort was forbidden.

At a UN press briefing in Baghdad on July 24, Salim Lone, a spokesman at the mission, took note of the string of four recent attacks against international staff. “Certainly we can no longer call these isolated incidents, not at all,” he told the press. UN staff were “easy, soft targets,” and it was “so easy to pick on us.” His comments were picked up in the international media, and Fred Eckhard, the chief UN spokesman in New York, sent a note to Shashi Tharoor, the head of public information, recommending that Lone be barred from speaking to the press in the future. Eckhard wrote that Lone had “contradicted [the official] position that attacks on UN workers were isolated incidents.”²² When Lone received his dressing-down, he responded with fury and demanded an apology. He described as “laughable” Eckhard’s notion that attacks were isolated:

I guess you will want us to hold on to that line even when we are bunkered down in [the] Canal Hotel or hightailing it out of Iraq to implement our rapid reaction plan. Which could happen any day. MANY think this should be implemented automatically if there is one more fatal attack on a UN staff/vehicle. Some actually say we should be evacuated. Do you know what the security situation here is like and the conditions we now work under are, especially after the two attacks and the two UN deaths and a third near fatality that occurred two days before the briefing? Do you know how many UN missions are being conducted in an active combat zone undergoing guerrilla warfare?²³

Vieira de Mello with Shiite clerics in Hillah.

But Lone was inexperienced in conflict settings. More seasoned UN staff in Iraq saw the recent flurry of incidents differently.²⁸ Because several of the attacks had occurred in the vicinity of IOM offices or personnel, many UN staff believed the IOM was being targeted because it had effectively made itself part of the Coalition. The IOM was not a UN agency, but it used UN vehicles, and it had gotten involved (despite having assured Vieira de Mello that it would not) in two highly sensitive initiatives sponsored by the Coalition: resolving property disputes in Kurdish areas, and helping reintegrate demobilized Iraqi soldiers. Vieira de Mello was enraged by the IOM’s double-dealing, but he resisted his colleagues’ calls to sever UN links to the organization. Lopes da Silva remembers, “It was part of Sergio’s personality to work things out. That was Sergio—he would keep trying, keep trying, rather than cut them loose.”

By the end of July at least four hundred UN international staffers were in Baghdad alone, and their safety was looked out for by some twenty professional security staff, who were responsible for the entire country.²⁴ Very few incoming UN officials attended the mandatory security briefings, and almost none of the heads of agencies insisted they do so. The UN security team’s threat assessment, written July 25, said: “Direct assaults on clearly identified UN staff and facilities are all but a certainty.”²⁵

By August Vieira de Mello had grown unusually irritable. Whenever he left the country and traveled along the airport road, American security contractors stopped his UN car and attempted to search it. He continued to refuse to grant the Coalition this right.“The bastards need to learn to respect the UN flag,” he said. He staged acts of civil disobedience reminiscent of the actions he had taken as a thirty-four-year-old political officer in Lebanon. With the 120-degree summer heat blaring down on his convoy, he often sat, arms folded and fuming, for more than an hour until the contractors agreed to allow his UN vehicle to pass.

When he ducked out of Iraq to attend a World Economic Forum meeting in Amman, Jordan, prominent foreign ministers besieged him with requests for meetings, but as he scanned the roster of renowned attendees, the only name that caused him to light up was that of Brazilian novelist Paulo Coehlo. “Look!” he exclaimed to his aide Salman Ahmed. “Do you think there’s any chance I could get a meeting with him?” When he returned to Baghdad, he told colleagues that his private meeting with Coehlo had been the highlight of his trip. When the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa passed through Baghdad, Vieira de Mello cleared out his schedule to spend time with him. After Vargas Llosa had left,Vieira de Mello immediately wrote to André Simões, his nephew and godson in Brazil, and asked him to send the Portuguese translation of The Way to Paradise by mail as soon as he could.²⁶ He wanted to read about anything except Iraq. The reading care packages from his mother and friends came as they had throughout his career, and he devoured them.

But with his UN staff, he tried to keep up appearances. His staff watched him carefully. "Whenever his face would change,” Marwan Ali recalls, “we would wonder what was happening.” His reports back to New York concentrated on what had been achieved, not on what was being denied. He worried about his team. The hotels lacked electricity and running water, and the heat was unbearable. He signed off his e-mails “with warmest (literally and figuratively) personal regards.” When Larriera told him that one member of his team had picked up a cold in the scorching heat, he corrected her: “No, Carolina, she doesn’t have a cold. She’s breaking down because the stress is too high.” He insisted that Prentice take a week off to join his wife for a celebration of their first wedding anniversary. Rick Hooper, the Arabic-speaking political officer who worked on Iraq in New York as Under-Secretary-General Prendergast’s special assistant, flew to Baghdad to replace him. Hooper had long argued that Annan should have declared the Coalition invasion illegal (which the secretary-general would not do until an interview with the BBC in September 2004).

Jean-Sélim Kanaan, the French-Egyptian political officer, left Iraq in July so that he could be with his wife, Laura Dolci-Kanaan, in Geneva when she gave birth to their first child. In his last letter before departing Baghdad, he wrote that the Coalition had taken the UN colors and “trailed them in mud.”

I have to say that I am secretly awaiting the moment when the United Nations finally finds a role that is our own . . . What an extraordinary moment that will be—one where we will be able to give the order to a [U.S.] soldier to lower his weapon and to keep silent. And no longer having to undergo this public humiliation of the body searches in the streets, despite our UN badges, despite our diplomatic status . . . It appears to me more and more evident that the United States is going to come begging for the aid of the rest of the world to face this titanic task. The quagmire becomes stickier each day . . . But we must be careful in this game, as there are twenty-eight million players who no longer find this funny at all. And God knows how much harm angry people can do.²⁷

As the security concerns of UN staff multiplied, each team member expressed different fears. Carole Ray, Vieira de Mello’s secretary, hated traffic jams because she feared an angry mob. Shawbo Taher, an Iraqi Kurd who worked as Salamé’s assistant, felt most frightened in her hotel at night. The hotel was not guarded, and the rooms had large glass windows that looters or assailants could easily break through. A sense of doom pervaded. In late July Bob Turner, a UN humanitarian official, remarked to Kevin Kennedy, “It isn’t a question of if we get hit. It is a question of how we get hit and where we get hit.”

Although Vieira de Mello urged others to take breaks, he did not feel he could do the same. “Sergio was very conscious of his role as the leader of the mission, setting the tone for everyone else,” recalls Larriera. “He knew he couldn’t be seen to be breaking down in front of his staff.” In all the time he was in Iraq, he took only one day off, stealing twenty-four hours with Larriera in Jordan. Desperate for a break, he arrived in Amman at 2 a.m. on July 18, and they drove to Petra at 8 a.m. the following morning. In other postings he had been able to exercise freely, but in Baghdad he was restricted to jogging fifteen laps in a stadium that was heavily guarded by the Americans. “You know, Sergio, I will not die by bullet here in Iraq,” Ibrahim, his bodyguard, said, running in the Baghdad heat with Larriera, Prentice, and Vieira de Mello. “But I will definitely die of heat exhaustion.” Vieira de Mello also attempted nightly workouts inside the hotel, jogging up and down the stairs. But the security deterioration increasingly confined his movements to the route between the Cedar Hotel and the Canal Hotel.

In previous missions his frustrations with UN Headquarters—the delayed responses, the administrative hassles, the seeming obliviousness of bean counters and ambassadors alike to the field staff’s daily trials—had exasperated him. But in Iraq they infuriated him. Salamé wondered aloud how Vieira de Mello could have remained in the system. “The UN is a residual institution,” Salamé said. “When nobody wants to deal with an issue, it is left to the UN.” Vieira de Mello was initially defensive. “No, it is not residual,” he said. “In terms of productivity,” Salamé persisted, “it is not a zero, it is less than a zero.” Vieira de Mello snapped, “Listen, Ghassan, the UN is unable to attract the best. None of the member states will give the UN their best. And on the rare occasion that the UN happens to find the best, it doesn’t have the slightest idea how to keep them. If the UN ever succeeds, it is by accident.” He gave Salamé some advice: “If you ever join the UN, I have just one rule for you: Spend as little time as possible in New York.”

Increasingly claustrophobic in Iraq, he tried to focus on the personal life that awaited him once he left. He received word from the tribunal in France that his divorce would be completed in October. His relations with his sons had improved. Laurent had received his engineering degree in Lausanne, and they had celebrated together before he left Geneva. His relationship with Adrien had taken longer to heal, but they had begun to correspond again. By good fortune Adrien happened to be in New York with his girlfriend and her parents when Vieira de Mello briefed the Security Council in July, so they had gone out for dinner at a steak house. Still, he hoped to build closer ties to them. He e-mailed them that it was “very hot and very difficult” in Baghdad and urged, “Please keep writing to me.”

Vieira de Mello knew from Bosnia how difficult it was to persuade Western countries to share intelligence with the UN. But in other missions the UN was at least able to rely on its own peacekeepers and police, or on local authorities, for assistance; in Iraq the Coalition was the only available source of intelligence, early warning, and security. Vieira de Mello’s Australian military adviser, Jeff Davie, found the Americans’ tight-lipped posture exasperating. “If I hadn’t been wearing a blue beret,” Davie says, “my access would have been entirely different.” Davie was not allowed to enter the Coalition’s operations room or review its intelligence assessments.Vieira de Mello pushed General Sanchez for more cooperation. He even offered to send over Prentice. “Intelligence will not go beyond these four eyes,” Vieira de Mello said, “and Jonathan is a Brit. He’s one of you!” Sanchez demurred. On July 14 Lopes da Silva sent the CPA a letter requesting that the UN formally post a security liaison officer with the Coalition, but the appeal was ignored.²⁸ In Vieira de Mello’s meetings with General Sanchez, he pleaded for more access to information. “I’m security blind,” he told the U.S. commander. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on.” On July 24, when he met with several senior Coalition military officers, the group discussed improving U.S. knowledge of UN locations, establishing a “9-1-1 number” for incidents, and streamlining a process for assessing and circulating threats to the UN.²⁹ But security cooperation between the UN and the Coalition remained ad hoc and inadequate.

Many within the UN would have been upset if the relationship had grown closer. In August Vieira de Mello prepared for a trip to northern Iraq. In testimony to his increased concern about security, he asked Davie to review his itinerary. “I already have the approval of my security team,” he said, “but have a look at this and let me know what you think.” Davie brought the schedule to the Green Zone and ran the locations by an accessible U.S. intelligence officer.When Nadia Younes,Vieira de Mello’s chief of staff, learned that Davie had done so, she was very upset. “How could you have told the Coalition where Sergio was going?” she said. “We don’t want to run our plans by them.”

The platoon of U.S. soldiers who offered light perimeter security for the Canal complex had been given UN radios so they could communicate with UN security officers, but they were not authorized to search incoming vehicles or personnel. They could use the UN cafeteria and the Internet facilities, but they were forbidden to bring their weapons inside.³⁰ But most U. S. soldiers simply shielded their pistols as they entered, putting them in the back of their waistbands.The U.S. platoon that milled around the perimeter manned a pair of 50-caliber-machine-gun posts on the roof of the hotel. They were wedged in between the large water tanks and not visible from the ground. But on July 23, when Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by U.S. troops, gunfire erupted throughout the capital and several shots hit the building.The soldiers from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment on the roof fired back, and a mini-firefight ensued.

By August the UN was torn between needing the Americans for security and believing that the American presence, which was increasingly despised by Iraqis, undermined its security.“The Coalition and the UN were like two tango dancers, locked in an embrace, but determined to stay at arm’s length from one another,” Davie recalls. Baghdad was far more dangerous than it had been in June, but the number of U.S. troops offering light security outside the Canal did not increase.

Lopes da Silva, who chaired the UN security meetings, was overwhelmed by his manifold humanitarian tasks. He did not convene the meetings regularly or keep careful records. The security staff never did contingency planning for a bomb attack. And Tun Myat, who ran UN security in New York, did not press Lopes da Silva to comply with regulations.

In late July and early August UN security officials invited several private security firms to the Canal to pitch their services. But the process of hiring them would be torturously slow. Even the security improvements to the Canal Hotel facilities ordered back in May had not yet been undertaken. On June 15 the windows in Vieira de Mello’s office had been treated with sun-resistant ultraviolet sheeting but not with professional blast-resistant film. The solution was understood to be temporary. In late June, after a shooting incident near the Canal resurrected concern over the Canal’s windows, an official from the World Food Program offered to fund the procurement and installation of the film, but inexplicably the chief administrative officer, Paul Aghadjanian, turned the offer down, claiming that he had already started the tendering process.³¹ Aghadjanian had his hands full wrapping up the Oil for Food Program, and security follow-through was never his priority. Because he opted to finance the film installation using petty cash, he instructed the engineer who began coating the windows in mid-July not to exceed the $200 petty cash ceiling.³² Nearly three months after the need for blast-proofing the windows had been identified, only Vieira de Mello’s office and the cafeteria had been fitted with shoddy film. The rest of the UN’s office windows remained exposed.

Meanwhile the new wall that was being erected to separate the Canal from its neighbors was being built right up alongside the UN building itself, leaving no real buffer between the UN complex and the outside world. The wall would be thirteen feet high around much of the compound, but beneath Vieira de Mello’s office and several of those next to his, it would reach just seven feet. The builders said they would try to finish the wall by September.

SOFT TARGET

The first dramatic sign that Americans were not the only target of the ever-evolving insurgency came on August 7. At 11 a.m. a minivan pulled up outside the gate of the Jordanian embassy, where Iraqis were lining up for visas. The driver got out of the vehicle, crossed the median, and got into another vehicle, which drove off.³³ Minutes later the deserted minivan exploded, killing seventeen Iraqis, including five police officers. In the wake of the attack a group of Iraqi men ran into the embassy wreckage and emerged carrying portraits of the former King Hussein of Jordan, which they ripped into bits and threw into the flames. “We don’t need you, Jordan!” one man shouted in Arabic, as he tore up a Jordanian flag.³⁴

The force of the blast was so great that a Mercedes parked next to the detonating vehicle was blown onto the roof of a nearby three-story building. A group of children in a nearby house who were watching the Cartoon Network on satellite television emerged into the street when they heard the explosion, only to watch men and women in flames running around helplessly while they burned to death. Scattered body parts, including a severed head, lay by the side of the road.³⁵ No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

The attack on the Jordanian embassy was unprecedented. It was the single deadliest attack in Baghdad to date and the first prominent attack on a “soft target.” Prior to this bomb the insurgents had primarily targeted U.S. military personnel and Iraqis working with them. In UN security and policy meetings the incident was hotly debated. Was this a turning point? Were internationals now seen as fair game? Or was this attack somebody’s private vendetta against Jordan? Salamé, who joined in a UN press briefing after the attack, was asked why the UN had condemned this attack but not others. "Well, this attack appears to be a new kind of attack,” Salamé said. “This is a new form of violence. This is an attack on civilians, and I don’t see who can really applaud this kind of unjustified and unacceptable act of terror.”³⁶

Davie,Vieira de Mello’s military adviser, asked his contacts at the Coalition to share their forensic and intelligence assessments of the bomb, which they promised to do. The FBI, which had only just received the requested bomb-blast equipment, quickly determined the type of bomb used and the way it was detonated. Davie checked back with the Coalition and was told that the intelligence assessment was still in the works. Davie did not find the delay surprising, as the CPA seemed to have limited insight into the nascent insurgency. What Davie did not know was that the FBI intelligence had yielded two utterly conflicting theories.

One theory held that Saddam Hussein’s enemies had struck the Jordanian embassy because Jordan had recently granted asylum to Hussein’s two daughters and their nine children. The daughters had not gone gently into the night.They had appeared on CNN and al-Arabiya shortly after arriving in Amman and praised their father, calling him “tender, very loving.”³⁷ The attack could have been payback against those who had aided the family of the Iraqi dictator.

Another view held that Saddam Hussein loyalists had struck the embassy because Jordan had taken the side of the United States in the 1991 Gulf War and had allowed some two thousand U.S. Special Forces to enter Iraq from Jordanian bases during the recent invasion.³⁸ Jordan had also been the only Arab state to send troops to join the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. In the preceding several weeks Saddam Hussein had released four broadcasts, delivered in the style of presidential statements, urging citizens to become “a loaded rifle in the face of the invading foreigner.”³⁹ Jordan could have been targeted as an ally of the invaders. As one U.S. analyst involved in the investigation recalls, “You had incredibly high-powered analytic work being done, in which diametrically opposite conclusions were drawn.”

Vieira de Mello phoned his old friend Prince Zeid Raad Zeid al-Hussein, Jordan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who offered a third theory. “We can’t be sure,” said Zeid. “But the rent-a-mob aspect makes it look like Chalabi’s people.” In 1992 Jordan had convicted Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi in absentia and sentenced him to twenty-two years in prison for financial misconduct. The very day of the bomb, Chalabi’s daughter had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending her father and attacking Jordan’s “servile complicity with Saddam.”⁴⁰ Both Vieira de Mello and Prince Zeid thought it suspicious that, with the Jordanian embassy still smoldering, a group of Iraqis had ignored the injured, entered the compound, and extracted not valuables but portraits of King Hussein, so as to rip them up ostentatiously on television.

The theory that got the least traction was the one that would prove most likely. August 7 was the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.The CPA floated the possibility that behind the Jordanian embassy strike was Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), a Kurdish terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda, which was reported to have had a small presence in northern Iraq before the war. General Sanchez said publicly that an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq was “clearly a possibility,” but the Americans then had minimal evidence of their infiltration. The al-Qaeda theory got minimal play.⁴¹ Vieira de Mello told the secretary-general he was not yet sure the attack was a turning point. “It just depends on who did it and why,” he told Annan. “This incident alone doesn’t give us enough to go on.” The Bush administration downplayed the event. Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said the attack was part of an inevitable “ebb and flow” in violence.⁴² General Sanchez said the 37,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad would not assume responsibility for guarding embassies. “This is the Iraqi police’s responsibility,” he said.⁴³ Secretary of State Powell said, “Maybe what you want to do is stand back a little bit more and let Iraqis” take over more protection tasks.⁴⁴ But in Iraq Thomas Fuentes, the American who headed the FBI team, cabled headquarters and requested they send him experienced bomb-blast experts. He expected more attacks on civilian targets.

As Mona Rishmawi was leaving her hotel on the morning of August 12, she saw a stash of leaflets scattered on the ground before her. On inspection she saw that the leaflets bore Osama bin Laden’s picture. Rishmawi thought, “Baghdad and al-Qaeda—these two things don’t match. What a bizarre joke. What are these people doing?” Since President Bush had partly predicated the war on a link between Saddam Hussein and September 11, she wondered whether the Americans had planted the leaflets to justify the invasion. The same day the UN daily security incident summary noted, “The [Coalition Forces] received intelligence reports that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled the country during the war have returned and are planning to conduct major terrorist attacks.”⁴⁵

On August 12, 2003, Salim Lone, the UN public affairs officer, sent an e-mail to Vieira de Mello describing the mounting fear in the mission after the Jordanian embassy attack. The following day he provided his boss with a list of questions that he might be asked at that day’s press conference, the first he would give in more than six weeks. Among them was: “Is the UN worried it is one of the soft targets?”⁴⁶ Lone urged security team members to tell the U.S. soldiers to leave. Chergui, who felt the violence escalating, thought Lone’s idea irresponsible. “Don’t come here and say they should go,” he said. “We don’t have anyone else, and if something happens, we will immediately blame the U.S. for not being there.”

Salamé moved freely around Baghdad without concern for the security protocols. But on August 13 a Lebanese journalist brought him small slips of paper that he had found at the scene of an explosion in the commercial Karada district. The papers were colored sky blue, and each was the size of a business card.They had been thrown from a car like confetti after the explosion. “Al-Qaeda” was written on them in Arabic. Salamé was as puzzled as Rishmawi. He went straight to Vieira de Mello. “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” he said.“It could be fake, but it looks serious.” Vieira de Mello showed the papers to his trusted bodyguard Chergui. “Where were these found?” Chergui asked. The three men discussed the papers for a few minutes but didn’t know what to conclude, beyond that they should keep an eye out for further signs of foreign infiltration. It was their first serious conversation about a possible al-Qaeda presence in Iraq. Up to that point the insurgency was widely assumed to be fueled by Iraqis who had been close to Saddam Hussein or who were contesting the American occupation. Chergui was supposed to go on leave the next day, but he told his boss that he would prefer to postpone his departure. The two men were so close that Vieira de Mello maintained an e-mail correspondence with Chergui’s wife, Martine. On August 7 he had e-mailed her asking whether she felt lonely without her husband. Claiming sole responsibility for Chergui’s absence,Vieira de Mello noted that, while Chergui was doing an excellent job, “You have an equal right to him.”⁴⁷ He insisted that Chergui take leave as he had planned.

The UN staff was split between those who expected an attack on the UN and those who could not imagine it. All agreed that security was spinning out of control. “I come from the most violent part of the world,” Marwan Ali recalls, “and I, even I, couldn’t believe that in two or three months things could deteriorate as badly as they had, even though the whole time I was saying things would deteriorate badly.” Most UN staff also agreed that the UN had an image problem throughout the country. Vieira de Mello had come to realize that Resolution 1483, which legitimated the occupation, had been one more factor eroding the UN’s shaky standing.“I think we must be honest to ourselves and recognize there exists, in the minds of many Iraqis, mixed feelings about the record of the United Nations here,” Vieira de Mello told a reporter. “And you can’t expect them to make these fine distinctions between mandates given to the Secretary-General by the Security Council and the role of the Secretariat per se. They lump this all together as any public opinion would do.”⁴⁸

Bob Turner began chairing a UN advocacy group aimed at improving the UN reputation. “We thought that the negative impression of the UN was going to have a security impact,” he recalls. “We’d be safer if we could improve the standing of the UN.”A few days later a UN staffer in Mosul prepared a paper proposing a UN outreach campaign.“In view of the increased incidents targeting certain UN agencies and NGOs,” the paper said, it was time for the UN to use print, radio, and TV and to network with prominent Iraqi figures to publicize the UN’s humanitarian services and to gain citizens’ “trust.” In attempting to “feed” images to the media, the staffer warned against the “static image of the UN shot in studio” and recommended images that show “we are out there dirtying our hands to serve the population.”⁴⁹

But Vieira de Mello was sure that, whatever the UN’s sins, Iraqis still saw the organization as preferable to the Coalition. Iraqis he met told him that they hoped for a stronger, not a weaker, UN role. “They see the UN as an independent, reliable, good faith partner,” he assured visitors. “They know the UN has no hidden agenda.” He added, “They see clearly in the United Nations an independent and impartial player that is the only source of international legitimacy.”⁵⁰ When he had briefed the Security Council in New York, he said that the Iraqi people “unanimously call—including those who are critical, even resentful, over what they perceive to be the United Nations’ past record in their country—for an energetic, center-stage role for the organization.”⁵¹ But the trouble with this attitude was that he never disaggregated the "they.” And the Iraqi people were increasingly at odds with one another. More important, the Islamic radicals, who he did not yet know had infiltrated the country, had an agenda all their own.

Unusual for him,Vieira de Mello was beginning to feel personally vulnerable. He discussed moving offices with Chergui but feared it would panic staff. “I’d better leave that to my successor,” he said. Chergui decided to look for another space in the building where he could bring his boss in the event of an attack. After rummaging through the Canal, he identified a small storage space filled with folding chairs and tables just off the conference room on the lower level. He resolved to bring Vieira de Mello there in an emergency.

Throughout Baghdad, Coalition forces were getting ever jumpier. On August 12 the Pentagon released its official report effectively exonerating the U.S. military for the April shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which had killed two journalists and injured three others.⁵² This followed an incident on July 27 when U.S. troops had killed at least three Iraqis who crossed a military cordon; another on August 8 in which they fatally shot five more Iraqis, including an eight-year-old girl, at a newly erected checkpoint; and a third on August 9, when Coalition soldiers killed two Iraqi policemen whom they mistook for criminals.⁵³ On August 17 Mazen Dana, a forty-three-year-old veteran Palestinian cameraman with Reuters, had received U.S. permission to film the Abu Ghraib prison, which the day before had been the scene of a mortar attack that killed six Iraqis and wounded fifty-nine. U.S. troops outside the prison, perhaps mistaking his television camera with its white microphone for a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, fired several shots at close range. Dana’s camera recorded a tank heading toward him, the crack of six shots in quick succession, and the tumult of his camera falling to the ground.⁵⁴ Dana was killed on the spot. Vieira de Mello knew that the time for quiet diplomacy with the Americans had passed; he would have to speak out.

Although Dana was the twelfth journalist killed since the start of the war, this shooting had struck a particular nerve at the UN because it seemed to reflect a larger trend.Wearing the hat of human rights commissioner,Vieira de Mello knew that as attacks on U.S. soldiers increased, the Americans would become increasingly jittery and prone to shoot civilians.“In previous positions, I always condemned attacks on journalists,” he wrote in an e-mail to senior staff.“Should I not do it here as well?” His aides responded quickly, agreeing that the attack should be denounced, but expressing concern about the implications of condemning an “accidental” attack on a journalist when the UN had not publicly faulted the Coalition when it had killed Iraqi civilians.

Younes, his Egyptian chief of staff, urged her boss to couch the condemnation of Dana’s killing in a statement that “deplored in general the increasing number of civilian deaths and injuries occurring in the past few weeks,” but she noted, “We have to weigh the effect your statements, if you start reacting to all violence, will have on Bremer and Co.”⁵⁵ But having concluded that his private admonitions to Bremer were falling on deaf ears and that his access to the Coalition had already shriveled up, Vieira de Mello authorized his press officer to draft a press release condemning the incident.

Younes was one of the most outspoken members of Vieira de Mello’s team. As an Arabic speaker, she had a better sense of the swelling anger toward the Coalition than most of her international colleagues, whose primary exposure to Iraqis came in shuttling to and from their hotels. The previous week she had received a phone call from UN Headquarters in New York. Lamin Sise, Annan’s Gambian legal adviser, told her that she had been promoted to assistant secretary-general. She had been elated, not least because the job would get her out of Baghdad. But she quickly realized that as the chief of staff she was expected to facilitate the handover between Vieira de Mello and his as-yet-unnamed successor. This wouldn’t do. On Friday, August 15, she called Sise in a panic. She could not wait two months to leave. “Lamin,” she said, “I need to get out. The history of this country is very bloody. This place is on fire.” She telephoned twice more in order to press the point. Sise promised to try to expedite the hiring of her replacement.

Vieira de Mello did not have that option and focused on salvaging the mission. Unable to control security, he reflected on the source of the insurgency, which was an increasingly malignant occupation. He assumed that the way to improve security was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. “Who would like to see his country occupied?” he asked a Brazilian journalist. “I would not like to see foreign tanks in Copacabana.” Coalition troops had to have “more sensitivity and respect for the culture of the population,” he said.⁵⁶ The dignity of Iraqis was being trampled. Their “pride,” he told visitors, was “today deeply hurt.” He rattled off the catalog of harms that would have wounded anybody:They had lived under a barbarous regime; they had been killed by the hundreds of thousands in the war with Iran; their army had invaded Kuwait and then been swiftly dislodged, at the cost of thousands of lives; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions and isolation; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in “one of the most humiliating periods in the history of these people,” they had almost no say on how they were being ruled, and nobody had presented them with a road map to their liberation. Even in his remarks before the Security Council in late July, Vieira de Mello had urged diplomats to stop speaking of Iraq as the sum of its past afflictions. “Iraq is something other than a past repressive regime, it is something other than a pariah state,” he said.“It is not simply the scene of conflict, deprivation and abuse.”⁵⁷

The Americans had to stop talking about “nation-building,” he said, as “Iraq has five thousand years of history.” The Iraqis had “more to teach us about building nations,” he told a British interviewer, than the United States or UN had to teach them. Iraqis were fed up with being treated like a failed state. He told another visitor that the Iraqis complained to him that the Americans “keep referring to Rwanda.” “Why the hell do they refer to Rwanda?” they asked him. “This is not Rwanda!”⁵⁸ Vieira de Mello believed that additional Coalition troops should have been sent in the immediate aftermath of their ground victory in April. But now he argued that “saturating Iraq with foreign troops” would only exacerbate the humiliation and rage experienced by Iraqis. Instead, applying a lesson from East Timor, he pressed for a transparent timetable, “a calendar with dates.”⁵⁹ Just as Gusmão had taught him in East Timor, people had to be given a concrete road map so they could see how and when they would gain control of their own destinies.

Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed on the occupation.“In the short time I have been in Iraq, and witnessed the reality of occupation,” he wrote, “I have come to question whether such a state of affairs can ever truly be legitimate. Certainly, occupation can be legally supported. Occupation can also certainly be carried out benignly, grounded in nothing but good intentions. But morally and practically, I doubt it can ever be legitimate: its time, if it ever had one, has passed.” He urged the Coalition to “aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance.”⁶⁰

On Sunday, August 17, he gave a long interview with the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade of O Estado de São Paulo. Asked if he feared the UN might be targeted by terrorists, he said, “I don’t think so.” Although in-house he had urged the launching of a national advocacy campaign to improve the UN’s reputation, he knew his mother, Gilda, would read the interview in Rio de Janeiro, and he said, “The local population respects the United Nations, which is not what they feel toward the occupation forces.They view us as an independent and friendly organization and know we are here to help them.” He said he had few personal concerns for his safety. “I don’t know exactly why, but I believe I have been in more risky situations. Here in Baghdad, I don’t feel in danger as in other places where I worked for the UN.”⁶¹

Yet for all his attempts to maintain a brave face, he had soured on the mission so much that he was biding his time. The Iraqis on the Governing Council had initially told him that a UN representative would be housed with them, but they reversed this decision. His ties with Bremer were growing more tense. A few days after he had shared a relatively uneventful lunch with Ayatollah Hussein Ismail al-Sadr, a moderate cousin of the young Shiite militant, an enraged Bremer had telephoned him and accused him of “inciting the Iraqis to ask for democracy.” Bristling at the reprimand,Vieira de Mello asked his aide Marwan Ali, who had attended the lunch, whether he could remember what he had said. “Nothing inflammatory,” Ali said. “It was just the usual blah blah blah about democracy.”Vieira de Mello understood Bremer’s concerns about the time it would take to organize an election, but he thought that if Bremer started to find democracy inconvenient, the U.S.-led mission was doomed.

The Coalition was straying further from the rapid handover of power that Vieira de Mello had proposed. At the same time Moqtada al-Sadr was gaining power, and the more the Coalition tried to crush him, the stronger he became. “The last thing we should do is ostracize him,” Vieira de Mello told Jonathan Steele of the Guardian. “It’s always useful to have an enfant terribleif you can control him.” If Bremer had a timeline in mind for ending the occupation, he was keeping it to himself. Vieira de Mello told journalists what he had told Bremer from the start: “Iraqis are completely in the dark. They’ve got to know when this will come to an end.”

With the staff he had brought from Geneva, he began discussing the restructuring of the high commissioner’s office. He also began doing things he had never done in other, supposedly more dangerous missions, such as signing off his e-mails by urging friends to “please pray for us.” Coming from an avowed atheist, these e-mails struck people as strange. The day before he spoke with the Brazilian journalist, he had accompanied his bodyguards to a shooting range, where he received training in how to fire a gun and how to maneuver his vehicle in a hazardous situation.

The weekend of August 16 and 17 was not a good one. Insurgents blew up the pipeline transporting oil to Turkey and destroyed a water main in northern Baghdad, cutting off water to nearly half a million people.⁶² The only boost to the morale of Vieira de Mello and his team was the return of Jean-Sélim Kanaan, who arrived at the Canal Hotel the afternoon of Monday, August 18, toting cigars, champagne, and photos of his newborn son, then three and a half weeks old.

Vieira de Mello knew he needed to do what Kanaan had done: get out of Iraq. He asked Larriera if she could join him the following weekend for a break. But she told him that she could not skip an upcoming human rights workshop. She said his presence too was essential. “I just need one day off,” he told her. But she could not very well duck out of the workshop at his request.

Desperate for an exit strategy, he asked his secretary back in Geneva to book his and Larriera’s flights to Brazil, where he would see his mother and have surgery on his right eye, which had started to droop downward a full quarter-century after the Paris police had hit him with their truncheons in May 1968. On the afternoon of Monday, August 18, his airline tickets arrived from Geneva, dated September 30, 2003, his last day in Iraq. Vieira de Mello brought the tickets back to the Cedar Hotel and held them up before Larriera. “I need to think about the future, so I don’t lose my mind in the present,” he said. The tickets were proof that he and Larriera would actually escape Baghdad. When he bumped into Salamé in the hotel, he said he needed to sit down with him to discuss the tour of the Middle East he and Larriera were planning for later in the fall. He wanted to return to Alexandria, which he had visited with his father, and Lebanon, where he had lived as a boy and as a young UN official.

Annan telephoned the same day, asking him to meet him in Europe to update him on his recent consultations with Iraq’s Arab neighbors. “Don’t forget,” Vieira de Mello said, “you promised me. I’m going to spend a month with my mother in Brazil after I’m done here.” Annan replied, “Don’t worry, you’ve more than earned it.Take the month.”