U.N. aims to punish authors

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NEW YORK -- The United Nations has threatened to fire two officials who wrote an expose of sleaze and corruption during its peacekeeping missions of the 1990s.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is understood to have favored an attempt to block publication of the memoir, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, a True Story from Hell on Earth," scheduled to be published next month.

Still reeling from the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, officials in the upper echelons of the United Nations are alarmed by the promised revelations of wild sex parties, petty corruption and drug use diversions that helped the peacekeepers to cope with alternating states of terror and boredom.

Other senior officials, however, apparently have argued that any attempt to gag the book's three co-authors Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson, who are still on the U.N. payroll, and Kenneth Cain, who is now a writer would prompt more negative publicity.

Under U.N. staff rules, writers have to submit manuscripts for scrutiny. Authors can be disciplined if their work is not approved but they insist on publication.

Last week, a U.N. spokesman said the book had been judged not to be within the interests of the organization. "We can't stop them from publishing, but the rule means that the two who still work for us can be disciplined and dismissed," he said.

The co-authors, who met in Cambodia in 1993 and later worked in Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia and Somalia, say that petty corruption over expense accounts and living allowances was rife.

Miss Postlewait was in her early 30s when she went on her first trip abroad for the United Nations, supervising elections in Cambodia. There, she soon worked out that she could save enough money from her expense account to set herself up nicely back in New York.

In other frauds, U.N. staff were said to quote black market currency-exchange rates to pad out their expenses.

The authors also complain that they encountered "bureaucratic betrayal" on missions, as the United Nations purportedly struck cynical deals with corrupt local officials.

One senior U.N. official who defended the book said he thought that it belonged in the "contemporary tradition of gritty war reporting," and would do little damage to the reputation of U.N. peacekeepers.

None of the authors was available for comment.

Mr. Thomson, the son of missionaries, is in Cambodia, where he has built a house, and Mr. Cain, a Harvard law school graduate, is in Vietnam. A U.N. spokesman said Miss Postlewait was traveling but did not know her whereabouts.