Quai d’Orsay ‘Astonished’ at U.S. Report
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – The CIA report on Saddam Hussein’s efforts to bribe members of the international community to lift the sanctions against Iraq has opened fresh diplomatic wounds across the Atlantic and Pacific.
The new details on Mr. Hussein’s efforts to influence high officials in foreign governments could blunt Democratic criticism of the Bush administration as the report by Charles Duelfer found no actual biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in Iraq. Still, Mr. Duelfer’s report concludes that Mr. Hussein kept the capacity and had the intention to make these arms once the sanctions were lifted. He also skimmed $11 billion from the illicit oil sales while chronic rates of child malnutrition afflicted his people.
The investigators found that Mr. Hussein did his best to keep the pockets of senior Russian, French, and Indonesian officials lined. He authorized them to receive vouchers to sell mil lions of barrels of oil on the open market under the U.N. oil for food program. The list of recipients includes the U.N. official charged with overseeing the program, Benon Sevan.
The French foreign ministry spokesman, Herve Ladsous, said he was “astonished” by the charges that a former French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, had received Iraqi vouchers to sell 11 million barrels of oil as part of an extensive network of bribes. The spokesman protested that the charges were “against exclusively non-American companies and individuals without having made the effort to verify them in advance, either with the people themselves or with the authorities of the countries concerned.”
The French ambassador to the United Nations was blunter. “These allegations are unacceptable,” Jean Marc de la Sabliere said. “I’m talking about the whole allegation.”
The report does cite two American citizens and one British citizen who received oil vouchers, but does not release the names due to privacy laws.
The Indonesian Foreign Ministry in Jakarta said the allegation that President Megawati received vouchers to sell 6 million barrels “had no credence.”
Meanwhile Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovksy, who Mr. Duelfer’s reports says received vouchers to sell 53 million barrels of Iraqi crude, as saying “I never took a single dollar from Iraq or any other country.”
One American diplomat told The New York Sun yesterday that the allegations were “a diplomatic nuclear bomb.” The diplomat added, “Most of our ambassadors pleaded with the White House not to release the information.” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said “the report looked solid to us.”
The fresh charges from Mr. Duelfer’s report are the most authoritative account to date of how Saddam conned the U.N. and used his oil wealth to create pressure to lift the sanctions imposed on him in 1991 after the first Gulf War. Mr. Duelfer’s report is based on thousands of pages of documents collected after the fall of Baghdad and interviews with numerous high officials, including Mr. Hussein himself.
The new evidence may find its way into the three congressional investigations under way into the U.N. program. A spokesman for Senator Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said the chairman of the permanent subcommittee for investigations of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was expeditiously following the leads in the nearly 1,000-page Duelfer report. Mr. Coleman’s committee has already issued subpoenas for over one dozen individuals affiliated with the program.
One of the most damaging aspects of the Duelfer report is its allegations against Mr. Sevon, the man who oversaw the U.N. program that was supposed to use Iraq’s oil revenues to purchase food and medicine for the Iraqi people.
“At the center of the day-to-day operations of the U.N.’s $64 billion OFF program, Sevan, who spent his entire career at the U.N., received oil allocations through various companies that he recommended to the Iraqi government.” The report quotes a letter to the Iraqi Oil Ministry confirming that he directed payment to a Panamanian registered company called the Africa Middle East Company.
In total Chinese, French, and Russian individuals or concerns received 55% of the total number of vouchers issued under the oil for food program the report says.
When asked yesterday whether the Americans could have investigated the corruption of the program at the time, the spokesman for the American mission in New York, Rick Grinnell, said, “It took the United States six to eight months to get the Security Council to look at retroactive oil pricing. If the French and Russians wouldn’t have stopped us at that time from instigating an investigation on retroactive oil pricing, we would have stopped a lot more.”