UNITED NATIONS – On his first working day in the second most powerful position at Turtle Bay, Secretary-General Annan’s deputy Mark Malloch Brown locked horns with United Nations staffers yesterday, calling their rhetoric “toxic” and “cancerous” and accusing them of back-stabbing.

Yesterday’s meeting, designed to clear the air at the time of attempted staff cuts, ended in an exchange of accusations between Mr. Malloch Brown and staffers who disagreed with his portrayal of himself as “one of us.” The deputy presiding officer at yesterday’s staff meeting, Michael Sarsar, told The New York Sun that unlike other U.N. staffers, Mr. Malloch Brown has special “privileges” due to his relations with financier George Soros.

Trying to shrink the vast Turtle Bay bureaucracy, Mr. Malloch Brown has encountered resistance from some member states, specifically from a group of developing countries known as the Group of 77. “I don’t think there is fervor in the G-77 to cut staff,” said Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram.

At the same time, Mr. Malloch Brown antagonized staff members by “drawing from the hip” and making unnecessary offensive comments, several staffers said yesterday. Many still resent the way Mr. Malloch Brown replaced chief of staff Iqbal Riza in early 2005. During a secret meeting, several Americans close to the Democratic party and described as friends of Mr. Annan forced the secretary-general to replace the Pakistani Mr. Riza with the Briton Mr. Malloch Brown, who was hailed at the time as a strong manager capable of pushing major changes, repairing staff relations, and raising morale.

Last month Mr. Malloch Brown gave an interview to the British Broadcasting Corporation, accusing New York-based U.N. workers of being “privileged.” Shortly after the broadcast, the staff union passed a resolution, calling the remarks “misleading and divisive.” The union also launched a major $250,000 campaign to counter Mr. Malloch Brown’s assertions.

In the interview, discussing his attempt to shift staff privileges from New York to field positions around the world, Mr. Malloch Brown called U.N. staffers “the people in New York, on these tax-free salaries,” and accused them of being “a privileged, tenured minority” among U.N. workers. He also told the British interviewer that there is not enough diversity and that too many at Turtle Bay are “like you and me.”

Mr. Malloch Brown, who was promoted from chief of staff to deputy secretary-general on April 1, agreed to conduct yesterday’s meeting as “one piece” in a series of meetings designed to “dialogue” with staffers, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, adding there will be other, smaller meetings on a departmental level.

As the exchange became increasingly heated, speakers accused Mr. Malloch Brown of duplicity, an inability to punish senior officials who were charged with wrongdoing while firing lower-level staffers, and of advocating gender and national diversity in hiring while assuming a high position himself.

At one point during the meeting, which was broadcast on the in-house U.N. television, Mr. Malloch Brown denounced the “toxic, cancerous rhetoric that we heard this morning.” Last year, as the oil-for-food scandal prompted reporters to seek information damaging to the U.N., he said, some staffers cooperated with Turtle Bay enemies, striking yet “one more nail in the organization.”

Pleading with staffers to see him as one of their own, he said, “What can propel one staff member to yell at another? We are all in this boat together.” To which one staffer answered, “I do not feel that you are one of us.” You are a “politician,” he said.

“We don’t enjoy the privileges he enjoys,” Mr. Sarsar, a document control worker, told the Sun after the meeting. He specifically referred to the special housing arrangement, first reported in the Sun, in which Mr. Malloch Brown rents a mansion in a ritzy neighborhood from Mr. Soros at a below-market rate of $10,000 a month. Mr. Malloch Brown is the one who “enjoys tax-free privileges,” Mr. Sarsar said.

Separately, contrary to Mr. Malloch Brown’s announced “zero-tolerance policy,” 10 officials in the security department were allowed to retire from the U.N. recently with a severance package, although some of them were involved in an attempt to cover up an incident in which an Israeli guard was assaulted by fellow workers.

After the incident, involving swastikas drawn in the guard’s log book, which was reported in the Sun, the U.N. reopened an investigation, with results still pending. Sources familiar with the case said yesterday that the officials allowed to retire will now have no further obligation to cooperate with the investigation, although some of them were involved in a “whitewash” after the Israeli guard complained to higher ups.