The Asylum on the East River

By Daniel Drezner
September 13, 2005
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB112656041861538488,00.html
It is worth pondering whether the United Nations drives its American participants a little mad. Since the end of the Cold War, countless reform proposals have been put forward for fixing the U.N., to little avail. The organization's boosters repeatedly assert that it is flawed and corrupt but nevertheless indispensable. Its critics repeatedly stress the U.N.'s irrelevance -- but nonetheless insist that it must be constrained. Paradoxical arguments are only part of the ordeal that the U.N. seems to inflict on anyone who contemplates its existence.
Pedro Sanjuan's The UN Gang (Doubleday, 202 pages, $24.95) tries to explain why. In 1984, Vice President George H.W. Bush nominated Mr. Sanjuan to be the director of political affairs in the U.N. Secretariat, the massive administrative core of the institution. Mr. Sanjuan's real job was to spy on the Soviet spies working for the secretary-general. This was not an easy task: I was one against 274 of them at the time of my arrival. The UN Gang is Mr. Sanjuan's memoir of his U.N. experience. It does not present a pretty picture of the United Nations -- or, by the end of the book, of the author himself.
According to The UN Gang, the U.N. is a cesspool of graft, corruption, nepotism and incompetence -- and those are some of its less harmful qualities. Male administrators solicit sexual favors from female employees seeking promotions. The accounting procedures make Hollywood's bookkeeping look like a paragon of transparency. On Mr. Sanjuan's first day of work, he discovers cocaine in his telephone handset. He later observes drug deals involving U.N. officials in the parking garage.
As for whether the U.N. accomplishes anything, one passage nicely encapsulates the institution's pace: My arrival at work at 9:00 a.m. was unnecessary since the troops showed up at 10:00 or 10:30 … One-hour lunches were merely hypothetical since two and a half or even three hours was the accepted and honored UN practice. Departure from the premises after 5:00 p.m. was considered punitive. Most people were gone by 4:00.
This loosely supervised playground for alarmingly disturbed adults proves to be excellent cover for more sinister activities. During the Cold War, a combination of Soviet dexterity and American indifference allowed the KGB to infiltrate virtually every facet of the Secretariat. The Soviets' control of the library allowed them to requisition reams of unclassified but sensitive information from an array of American organizations.
A persistent problem is the U.N.'s anti-Semitic and anti-Israel biases. Mr. Sanjuan informs us that the use of the UN as a gathering place for Islamic fundamentalists has been a continuing phenomenon, which has only grown more blatant with the passage of time. He concludes that an intelligence cell in the U.N. must have abetted the terrorists who executed the Sept. 11 attacks.
Why has the United Nations been allowed to fester in this way? The UN Gang lists a number of culprits: the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for setting up such a toothless institution in the first place; the State Department (Mr. Sanjuan refers to it as the Department of Nice), for fearing the diplomatic fallout of rattling the U.N.'s cage; and a series of breathtakingly incompetent secretaries-general. Javier Pérez de Cuellar was someone who did not conceive of a single memorable idea or initiative in the field of international relations. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a desperate egomaniac whoring after reappointment.
What about Kofi Annan, the current secretary-general? He is largely absent from The UN Gang, and therein lies one of the problems with the book -- its dated quality. Mr. Sanjuan left the Secretariat in 1992, and almost all of The UN Gang is devoted to pre-1992 events. While the Soviet infiltration of Turtle Bay is of historical interest, it is not terribly relevant to the problems of today.
When Mr. Sanjuan does discuss the post-Cold War U.N., his information comes from secondhand sources. This is odd, because The UN Gang misses a golden opportunity to elaborate on at least one current figure -- Mr. Sanjuan's close friend John Bolton. He appears on only one page; apparently his interest in the circuslike goings-on at the UN never flagged. That's it.
After a few chapters one begins to wonder just how deeply the U.N. got to Mr. Sanjuan. Despite his entreaties to Congress, the State Department, the FBI and CIA, little or no action was taken in response to his reports of espionage and malfeasance.
Spending eight years in a funhouse like the U.N. without changing the institution in the slightest would drive many a person around the bend. In Mr. Sanjuan's case it seems to compromise his reliability as a narrator. The book is filled with utterances that, while not exactly wrong, sound contextually bizarre. He quotes himself saying to Vice President Bush: All U.S. government departments waste tons of money, particularly if you look at government from the anarchist point of view that considers most government activities unnecessary.
And the book is filled with overripe descriptions. In one passage Mr. Sanjuan writes that one office secretary must have sensed that I was an obvious, pulsating threat. Elsewhere, he writes that Mikhail Gorbachev feted him at the Kremlin -- a year after the Soviet Union collapsed. As for those accusations that the 9/11 terrorists received intelligence assistance from someone at the United Nations? The UN Gang does not offer any evidence to support the charge.
On his Web site, Mr. Sanjuan states that he has a penchant for the bizarre and the absurd. That phrase perfectly summarizes the U.N. -- and The UN Gang.
Mr. Drezner teaches political science at the University of Chicago.