The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(51)
OGAs stood for other government agencies. In the singular, OGA was usually shorthand for the CIA. But there were likely to be many OGAs marking out their territory around Akerman’s death. As he was a high-ranking UN official with diplomatic immunity, the US Secret Service would also be involved, along with the UNDSS and, because the victim was a foreign national, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Those were just the official players. Behind the scenes, Yael knew Akerman’s Iranian connection would attract the interest of the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, and doubtless Cyrus Jones’s former employer, the Department of Deniable. It was all a recipe for ferocious bureaucratic infighting. Which was good news because the backbiting between the agencies would give her some useful room to maneuver.
“Yes, we’ll get to that,” Hussein said. “Meanwhile, would you like some tea?”
She nodded.
As Hussein filled the kettle and prepared her drink, Yael looked around the familiar office, the familiar questions running through her head. What drove the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations? The more time Yael spent with him, the more she realized how little she really knew of him. Trying to pin down the SG was like trying to catch smoke. Hussein proclaimed himself a fighter for peace, yet he had done little to try and prevent the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. He championed the poor and the underprivileged, but he also loved luxury and the company of celebrities. All of his visitors were given a signed copy of his memoir, My Journey for Peace. Recounting his life from his childhood in Delhi to the present day, it was littered with dropped names of former and present presidents and prime ministers, actors and actresses who had been schmoozed into sprinkling stardust onto a UN campaign. However, even Yael had to admit that the parts about his early years, where Hussein dropped his mask, were moving.
He had been born in India, in 1940, to a Hindu mother and Muslim father. Both sets of parents had frowned on the marriage but the young couple had threatened to elope, and eventually, their families surrendered. In the cosmopolitan world of pre-Partition Delhi, his father, Ahmad, was a prosperous financier. The clients of his small private bank were drawn from the city’s financial elite. In part because of his own experience, Ahmad insisted that the family home was always open to visitors, with no regard to race or religion. Fareed and his brother, Omar, were privately educated at a small British-run school modeled on Eton College, where Britain’s elite were educated. Hussein still affected an upper-class British accent and dropped slang expressions of the 1940s Raj into conversation, both traits he secretly nurtured by reading P.G. Wodehouse novels.
Partition destroyed the family’s cozy world. In that summer of 1947, hundreds of thousands of citizens were expelled, forced to flee from the homes where their families had lived for centuries. The streets ran with blood as fanatics on both sides descended into a frenzy, slaughtering in their quest for racial and ethnic purity. Families of mixed heritages were especially targeted, so Ahmad Hussein took his family to Switzerland. Fearful of what might be coming, he had already moved most of the family’s money out of the country, but they still lost the bank, the family home, the summer house in the mountains, and all their belongings other than those they could carry.
But the Hussein family’s greatest loss was not material. Amid the chaos of a Delhi railway station, Omar’s hand had been wrenched from his brother’s by a surging mob, and he was never seen or heard from again. There was a photograph of him on Fareed Hussein’s desk: a skinny six-year-old with a gap-toothed grin. Next to the picture of Omar was another frame, which held half of a post card of the Taj Mahal. A few months before Partition, already sensing that bad times were coming, Fareed bought the post card, summoned his younger brother to the terrace of their house, and tore the picture in two. Then he and Omar made a solemn promise to keep their halves for the rest of their lives, just in case they were ever separated. One late evening, a year or so ago, Yael had walked into Hussein’s office to find him staring at Omar’s photograph, tears coursing down his face.
After a decade in Zurich, Ahmad moved his family to London. Fareed studied at the London School of Economics, then worked as an investment banker in New York and Frankfurt. To all outward appearances, he was a successful financier. But he was still psychologically scarred by the events of Partition and wanted to make a difference. In 1991, his fortune made, he joined the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as finance director. His appointment raised eyebrows across the UN empire; no one doubted his business skills, but he had no experience in any kind of humanitarian or public policy organization. His opponents mocked him behind his back for his mannerisms. But, one by one, they were sidelined, sacked, or encouraged to resign. Hussein shook up the torpid world of the UN bureaucracy. He soon gained a reputation as a mover and a shaker, one whose charming exterior hid a determined, sometimes ruthless operator.
After two years at the UNHCR, Hussein shifted to the Department of Political Affairs. DPA officials worked closely with the superpowers to prepare the agenda of the Security Council, whose decisions had the force of international law. Hussein carved out a niche for himself as the go-between between the United States, Britain, and France on one side and Russia and China on the other. By 1992, there were so many peacekeeping operations that a dedicated department, separate from the DPA, was set up to oversee the Blue Helmets. Worried that this new Department of Peacekeeping Operations might take a more muscular approach, the P5 made sure that Hussein was appointed as its head. As Yugoslavia burned and the Hutu genocidaires stockpiled their machetes, Hussein’s foremost priority was to ensure that what he called the UN’s “sacred neutrality” was not damaged.