The Passion of Paul Wolfowitz

did not come here to fuck you," the man began. "I should hope not," the woman replied, sitting in her downtown Washington office in August 2005, astonished. "I don't need you to be fucking me."

It certainly was an odd way for Xavier Coll, the lanky Spanish physician serving as the World Bank's vice president for human resources, to begin a conversation with Shaha Ali Kiza, a 51-year-old single mother and the acting communications manager for the bank's Middle East and North Africa bureau. Not only was Coll expected, as the bank's top HR official, to exhibit more chivalrous behavior, but Riza was, as he certainly knew, well connected. The very reason for his visit was to help resolve the thorny conflict-of-interest problem that had arisen five months earlier when Riza's lover, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary under Donald Rumsfeld, was selected by President Bush to serve as president of the World Bank.

Neither Coll nor the angry Riza ever specified which kind of "fuck" each had in mind: straightforward physical intercourse or the two-faced, arm's-length backstabbing that is, frankly, more common in Washington. It hardly mattered; sex never strayed far from the agenda during the ensuing controversy, which ended this past June with Wolfowitz's spectacu­lar fall from power amid a swirl of ethics charges and cries of a smear campaign.

Those who campaigned most vocally for Wolfowitz's ouster have portrayed their success as a simple story of crime and punishment, a case of gross and greedy favoritism exposed and redressed: The system, designed to protect a prestigious multinational lending institution that spends $20 billion a year to combat poverty worldwide, worked.

The reality was far different. What happened to Wolfowitz was more akin to a putsch, the work of entrenched enemies who seized on a false pretext to engineer the overthrow of a flawed and mistake-prone leader closely identified with an unpopular war. Perhaps Wolfowitz himself, who had found orderly regime change in Iraq so elusive, could look back in moments of reflec­tion with some admiration for the swift; clean way it was achieved at the World Bank.

For the timing, which was roughly coincident with the excommunication of Rumsfeld and the trial and conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, suggested more broadly a season of retribution against the

very ideological class in American political life—neoconserva-tives—that had most ardently promoted that concept.

Intellect was never the problem. Born in Brooklyn in 1943 and raised in Manhattan, Wolfowitz came from a Polish immigrant fam­ily largely decimated by the Holocaust. He majored in mathemat­ics at Cornell and earned his Ph.D. in political science at the highly competitive—and conservative—University of Chicago, where his doctoral dissertation examined water-desalination programs in the Middle East. Over the next 30 years Wolfowitz attained proficiency in five languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, and served six presidents in a series of increasingly impressive posts in the diplo­matic and defense establishments. He rode out the Clinton years, a grim Siberian exile for neoconservative intellectuals, as dean of the Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies. In congressional testimony, he advocated missile defense and preemptive strikes against Saddam Hussein. The New Yorker conceded his ability "to recognize threatening patterns and capa­bilities that others had been unable to see."

If his brilliance went undisputed, Wolfowitz's personality sometimes left colleagues scratching their head or, worse still, questioning his judgment. "Paul is so virtuous," said one Wash­ington think-tank director, "I think he is sometimes"—a strug­gle for words—"naive." This perception of Wolfowitz as deeply principled but not always sensible persisted in the Bush admin­istration. In high-level councils preceding the September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz reportedly argued that Al Qaeda posed less of a danger to the United States than Saddam. He urged fellow deputies at the State Department and the CIA to use American military might to establish a beachhead in Basra, in southern Iraq, where, under his scenario, disaffected Iraqi generals would surrender, defect and launch their own anti-Saddam insurgency. Secretary of State Colin Powell sarcastically imagined the Iraqis embracing Wolfowitz's plan: " 'Ah, the Americans have taken 14 acres of southern Basra. Let's go turn ourselves in!'"

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, George Tenet, the former CIA director, writes that "Wol­fowitz in particular was fixated on the question of including Saddam in any U.S. response" to 9/11. Tenet recalls the dep­uty defense secretary being more adamant than either Bush or

Rumsfeld about Iraqi complicity in the attacks and pressing the CIA to "check, recheck and recheck" the issue after analysts concluded there was none. Likewise, as Karen DeYoung reports in Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, Richard Clarke, the Clinton holdover and White House counterterrorism czar, grew "increas­ingly testy with Wolfowitz's fixation on Baghdad."

Resentment burned inside Wolfowitz for years. At a black-tie dinner in March 2004 he gloomily swore to a reporter that the publication of Clarke's memoir, Against All Enemies, which claims President Bush blindly ignored the Al Qaeda threat, would cost Bush reelection. "I seriously doubt most voters know who the hell Dick Clarke is," the reporter coun­tered. "I also doubt eight months from now they're going to walk into the ballot booth and say to themselves, 'Well, gee, there was Dick Clarke's book....'"

"No," Wolfowitz frowned. "This is acid on the face of the president. Acid, I tell you!"

There was also—how else to put it?—the "ick" factor. Viewers of Fahrenheit 9/11 are treated to outtake footage of the deputy prepping for a TV interview, running his comb through his mouth like Dylan playing "Mr. Tambourine Man" on a harmonica, then mashing down his hair with spit on his hand, an embarrassed grin plastered across his elfin face. He left a similar impression after a visit, as World Bank president, to a Turkish mosque. Asked to remove his shoes, Wolfowitz revealed worn gray socks with identical holes through which his two big toes protruded like Daisy and Mozart popping their heads up from the burrow in an episode of Meerkat Manor. The photographs made him an object of ridicule. "Would you take fiscal advice," asked The Washing­ton Post, "from a man who won't spend $3 for new socks?"

He seemed to rub people the wrong way. "Obviously I ruf­fled some feathers," he admitted of his January 2006 deci­sion to suspend World Bank loans worth $124 million to the African country of Chad. The move was a logical response to the refusal of corrupt Chadian officials to abide by previous lending agreements, but inside the bank the decision dark­ened Wolfowitz's reputation and foreshadowed his later trou­bles. Up to that point the new president had worked hard— with some success—to establish (continued on page 136)

WOLFOWITZ

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what even a skeptical employee had described as a "collegial" relationship with the bank's staff. Now the Chad in­cident awakened all the latent discom­fort the bankers harbored about one of the primary authors of the war in Iraq, and it gave VVolfowitz's most dogged internal enemies their first opportunity to brand him an unreconstructed Bush-style unilateralist.

Speaking after his ouster, Wolfowitz seemed ready to admit the Chad episode had damaged his standing. "Maybe some members of the [bank's executive] board felt they were inadequately consulted," he said. "Yes, I may have, you know, maybe I took it on, they would probably say, in too confrontational a way." Most strik­ing about these remarks is their miserli­ness with the currency of remorse. What begins as VVolfowitz's qualified attempt at self-examination ("Yes, I may have, you know, maybe I took it on") quickly morphs into an exercise in dispassionate and thus wholly unapologetic reportage of his critics' views ("they would probably say, in "too confrontational a way"').

In the battle over his image, Wol­fowitz was ill equipped to compete. "He was nerdy, like the geeky boy in high school," said one bank staffer. "He had trouble looking you in the eye," an asso­ciate said, and was prone, when kidded, to "chuckle in a nervous way." "I could see," said a female subordinate, "how he would respond to a strong-minded woman who'd wear the pants."

Which brings us to Shaha Riza. Born in Tripoli and raised in Saudi Arabia, Riza studied international relations at Oxford. She joined the bank in 1997 and rose through its ranks despite an aggressive personality that endeared her to feminist fellow travelers but often left others—especially American men—cold. "I'm a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo," she once proudly declared, "both in the work of the World Bank and within the institu­tion itself." For this she was rewarded, she believed, with "open hostility against me by at least one member of the board of directors." Xavier Coll testified that Riza "felt the institution owed her because she had been mistreated and discriminated against by her managers."

A female staffer who worked along­side Riza in Washington and the Mid­dle East recalled her as "not a talker, very quiet," someone who would speak up only at the end of meetings, but also as "a bit of a ballbuster. She wasn't someone to be messed with. She was a strong woman. Men didn't get along

with her. Feminists loved her." The few published photographs of Riza show a middle-aged woman with dyed blondish-amber hair and pronounced rings beneath kindly eyes.

VV'olfowitz and Riza. in short, were hardly Brangelina. but they had each other. And as they prepared for Wol-fowitz to assume the World Bank presi­dency, a position that carries a five-year term and may be renewed by the bank's executive board, they likely envisioned themselves spending the next decade working together—individually but under the same roof—to advance the passionately pro-democracy agenda that bound their love.

Up till then the romance between Wol-f'owitz, a New York Jew. and Riza, the child of a Libyan father and Syrian-Saudi mother, was one of Washington's open secrets. "Wolfowitz regularly spends the night at Riza's home," The Washington Post's gossip column. The Reliable Source, reported in March 2005, when he was still the number two official in Rumsfeld's Pentagon. "Wolfowitz's guards wait in a car outside until he departs early in the morning." A neighbor chortled, "I don't know if it could be more public if it were on 16th and K streets." Separated from Clare, his wife of 30 years, Wolfowiiz spoke of divorce, but it remains unclear whether the split was ever finalized.

Also taking note of the relationship were Wolfowitz's Bush administration colleagues. Shortly after the Iraq war began, Wolfowitz arranged to have Riza appointed as a "subject-matter expert," or consultant, to a special Pentagon office. She provided analysis on her policy spe­cialty, the empowerment of women in Muslim societies, to the Office of Recon­struction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, the Pentagon's first stab at a U.S.-led post-Saddam Iraqi government (succeeded by the better-known Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA). In the dangerous month of April 2003 Riza took an unpaid leave from the bank to visit Baghdad, where she discussed with Iraqi women's groups how they could enlarge their role in the country's reformation.

Fluent in Arabic and lour other lan­guages and immersed for the past two decades in the wonky minutiae of global development issues, Riza was unques­tionably qualified for the assignment. Still, Defense Department auditors, their memories triggered by the Reliable Source item, quietly launched an investigation to determine whether Wolfowiiz, in choosing

her for the job, had "used his public office for [Riza's] private gain." Though they ulti­mately answered that question in the nega­tive, the probe turned up a series of e-mails indicating that the contracts lor Ri/a and the other consultants were issued "with­out full and open competition" and that Wolfowitz himself "may have exerted pres­sure on subordinates to bring [Ri/a] under contract on an expedited basis." "The E-Ring"—the Pentagon corridor housing the military's most senior officials, includ­ing Wolfowitz at the time—"is screaming to bring [the consultants! on now," read one e-mail. "Wolfowitz has taken a personal interest in getting this team together." read another. "[Name redacted] gets daily calls from Larry DiRita [a top Rumsfeld aide].... If we don't act soon, we will have lost the confidence of the E-Ring."

Questioned under oath about the episode by Pentagon investigators. Wol­fowitz claimed he couldn't remember whether he recommended Ri/a for the consultancy—but that if he had, it would have been because of her qualifications, not their personal relationship. A sepa­rate investigation, focused more broadly on Pentagon contracting in Iraq, also looked at Ri/.a's consultancy and con­cluded that officials at ORHA, scrambling to compose the criteria for her position after her selection for it, "neither fol­lowed nor tried to learn the acquisition process." "These are the people we need to bring on board," one official was told, "and make the rest of it happen."

Wolfowitz attributed these departures from standard operating procedure to an urgent need for the highly special­ized skills of the consultants, including Riza. Yet the deputy secretary—integrally involved in the conception and execution of the Iraq war and unapologciic about it to this day—also offered a rare and previ­ously unpublished admission of the Bush administration's deficiencies in planning for and presiding over postwar Iraq. "We got to Baghdad much faster than people anticipated," Wolfowitz testified, adding, "We were already starting to have large meetings of Iraqis debating the consti­tutional principles of the country, and we had no political team there to advise [ORHA head] Jay Garner and later [CPA chief L. Paul] Bremer on how to do it."

Here was Wolfowitz admitting the Bush administration had tailed to send any Americans to help the Iraqis draft a new constitution even as late as May 12. 2003, the dale Bremer took over as head of CPA. This was 1 1 days after the president's "mis­sion accomplished" appearance on the deck of the USS Abraham Ijnrnlti and almost live-weeks after the fall of Baghdad.

Nor is (he ORHA episode unique in offering an insight into how the personal relationship between Wolfowitz and Riza intersected with their professional lives. A high-ranking State Department official

remembered the couple's relationship intruding on another national security initiative: Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddali's historic secret agreement to disclose and dismantle all his coun­try's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic-missile programs in exchange for the restoration of diplomatic ties with the United States.

Announced in December 2003, the Libyan deal represented one of the most sensitive and significant projects of the first Bush term. Senior administra­tion officials repeatedly cited the inva­sion of Iraq, then just nine months old, as a prime factor in Qaddafi's change of heart. During his first debate with Senator John Kerry, at the University of Miami in September 2004, Bush boasted about the war's effects. "By speaking clearly and sending messages that we mean what we say," Bush said, "we've affected the world in a positive way. Look at Libya. Libya was a threat. Libya is now peacefully dismantling its weapons pro­grams. Libya understood that America and others will enforce doctrine, and the world is better for it."

Yet this momentous initiative was almost torpedoed by the Wolfowitz-Riza romance. "When we were doing Libya," the State Department official recalled, "we kept on running into all this resis­tance at OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and I kept wondering, What's the problem over there? Finally someone told me, 'It's Wolfowitz. He has a Libyan American girlfriend who hates Qaddafi.' And Wolfowitz was adamant that there'd be no deal until Qaddafi was dead."

Wolfowilz knew he would not be greeted in the World Bank as, well, a liberator. "Dr. Wolfowitz told us," the Pentagon investigators wrote in April 2005, that "strong opposition to the war was preva­lent within the World Bank." New to the institution's polished, Eurocentric culture and eager to establish his credibility with the bank's largely foreign, overwhelm­ingly anti-Bush management class, Wol­fowitz strove to play by the rules.

He had his attorney. Bob Barnett of Williams & Connolly, notify bank leaders that the incoming president and Riza had had. in the decidedly unromantic parlance of the UK world, a "preexisting relationship." I nwilling to sign a contract until the potential conflict was resolved, Wollowit/. suggested through Barnett that the bank's ethics committee1 guide the parties' actions. The bank agreed, and soon its general counsel, Roberto Dariino, a jowly, white-haired Peruvian, sent Barnett an e-mail saying, "We will arrange for the ethics committee to deal with this matter as soon as possible.'

Wolfowitz proposed a solution of recu-sal, some formal agreement to limit his professional dealings with his girlfriend (or companion, as Riza preferred to be

called). When Danino sought to clarify whether Wolfowitz had proposed sever­ing himself "from all personnel matters and professional contact related to" Riza, Barnett e-mailed back that U'olfowit/.'s remedy "WOULD NOT—I REPEAT, NOT—INVOLVE RECUSAL FROM PROFESSIONAL CONTACT." The next day, having disabled his caps lock key, Barnett e-mailed Danino to explain thai the president-elect intended only to recuse himself from "personnel actions or decisions" concerning Riza, a formu­lation that enabled the two to maintain contact at the World Bank.

In staking out this position, Wolfowitz was likely envisioning a relationship simi­lar to the one Riza had had with the bank's previous president, James Wolfensohn; separated by multiple levels of bureaucracy, the two had interacted only "a handful of times," Riza later testified. More impor­tant, Wolfowitz was likely signaling to the executive board that he and Riza knew all about certain other "situations" at the bank. Two women had been permitted to continue working there while their hus­bands served in senior management posi­tions. As managing director, Shengman Zhang was Wolfensohn's number two man, overseeing worldwide operations for five years. Zhang's wife, Ling/hi Xu, who began her World Bank career as a D-grade procurement assistant earning an annual salary in the range of $52,000, received a series of impressive promotions and ulti­mately secured a senior specialist position with an average annual salary of $ 123,000. Danino later admitted that Xu "ended up being in the same unit Zhang was head­ing." The conflict ended only when Zhang left for Citigroup. A bank employee later told The Wall Street journal that Xu's ascent was fraught with "question marks."

Then there was Maritta R. von Bieber-stein Koch-Weser, an anthropologist who held several management positions at the bank, including the (characteristically pithy) title of "director for environmentally and socially sustainable development for the Laun America and Caribbean region." Meanwhile, her husband, Caio Koch-Weser, a handsome German economist—John Forsythe in banker's pinstripes—enjoyed a 26-year career at the bank, which cata­pulted him, too, to the level of managing director. "Neither wife was asked to leave the institution," Riza later testified. "If [either Zhang or Koch-Weser] was the sole managing director and he had no conflict of interest, why would I have any conflict of interest?... I was wondering, maybe because they're married, [the ethics com­mittee members] are seeing that their relationships are asexual. But because I'm dating, there must be sex there."

For that argument Danino had a ready retort. In the World Bank's dreary Ham-murabic code of professional conduct. Staff Rule ;i.() 1 stipulates that "a sexual relation­ship between a staff member and his/her

direct report or direct or indirect manager or supervisor is considered a de facto con­flict of interest." Coll and the bank's HR mandarins considered Wolfowitz, as presi­dent, to possess "a reporting line to any­body in the institution." Conversely, Staff Rule 4.01 sets forth the byzantine though theoretically practicable circumstances under which spouses may carry on work­ing relationships.

The bank stood on shakier ground in the question of whether the Zhang and Koch-Weser cases would look bad in the event Riza sued the bank. All parties dryly termed this extreme fear of adverse publicity the bank's "reputational risk." The phrase recurred throughout the Wolfowit/.-Riza case, an invisible MacGuffin and spoken mantra, shorthand for catastrophe. "There was reputational risk of this blowing up," an employee testified, "and us looking like we treated women like chattel." Danino judged Riza's chances of prevailing at trial "very remote," but he too acknowledged the "implicit reputational risk" the case posed and that he was "constantly aware" of it. Coll privately assessed the bank's legal jeopardy, solved for the elusive X of reputational risk, with far less sanguinity. "We are in a very difficult situation—with no precedents at the bank—and it has enormous potential to damage the bank's reputation," the HR vice president wrote in an August 2005 memo, adding "there is a great risk to the bank if we cannot come to a workable agreement in a few days."

A Riza v. World Bank lawsuit had begun to loom as a real prospect the month be­fore, when ethics committee chairman Ad Melkert, a Dutch Labor Party politician— another in the bank's seemingly endless supply of balding white men in stylish European eyeglasses—icily informed Wol­fowitz that "the ethics committee does not consider recusal sufficient." Moreover, Melkert said, the ethics committee "advises [Riza] be relocated to a position beyond (potential) supervising influence by the president"—meaning out of the bank alto­gether, with the banishment to last the du­ration of Wolfowitz's tenure.

For Riza, the "ballbuster" whose chief sin was to have fallen in love with Paul Wolfowitz, the options were sud­denly cruelly limited to three choices: immediate termination with or without compensation, nasty litigation or "sec­ondment," a transfer to an equivalent job, with equivalent benefits, at a place like the State Department. "I felt under attack," Riza testified. "I was 51 years old and being asked to remove myself from a career path to employment limbo for five if not 10 years. Why should 1 resign just because he became president? This is my world. This is my life."

At a farewell party for Wolfensohn. Riza ambushed Coll and unleashed a torrent of indignation and threatening allusions to workplace unpleasantness, adverse publicity and litigation—repu­tational risk in all its monstrous, Hvdra-

headed forms. "1 told him that this is absolutely unacceptable," she later testi­fied. "Tm not going to leave this place, and there is nothing that you can do about it.... If you think I'm not going to take this all the way up just because you have Paul Wolfowitz as president, you must be joking, because I'm going to relish it even more if he's there."

"She was extremely unpleasant," an employee recalled.

Thus the stage was set for the rocky meeting in Riza's office, where she and Coll, according to Riza's testimony, both forswore the desire to "fuck" each other. Coll attempted to explain—"I suppose lo give me a sweet," Riza said—(hat in view of the disruption to her career, her com­pensation would include immediate pro­motion to H level. But Riza. as an acting manager, was already short-listed for an H. Coll tried to sound conciliatory ("We need to be discussing this further"); Riza did not ("I will be coming in with my lawyer"). The two had another bruising encounter three days later, on August 11. Coll coolly opened with a lump-sum offer. Riza. who acknowledged growing "emotional at parts" of their talk, angrily demanded automatic I and ) promotions.

Riza's testimony about this meeting exposed the emotional strain the contro­versy was inflicting on her, as well as the heavy toll it was taking on her relationship with Wolfowitz: She was disgusted that he did nothing to oppose her tormentors. "You're not going to buy me out," she recalled sneering at Coll. "And you can go back and tell your boss, the president, that he's not going to buy me out either."

"Why is it the woman is always the one who has to leave?" she asked at her depo­sition. "I was fighting for that [principle]. I'm a single mother. I am the one who lakes care of my son. I don't have a man taking care of me." .Asked if she discussed Coil's offer with Wolfowitz, she replied. "If you think I'm angry now. you should see me angry there. I thought he should have fought the decision by the ethics committee. He became them, you, the bank, and I had to fend for myself."

Woe was Wolfy! He had never signed up for a two-front war. At home, his girl­friend fell betrayed by his inaction. Al the bank, pressure was mounting on him lo do something, regain control of the situ­ation, bring his girlfriend to heel—atl like a man. "You're sleeping with her; you solve it!" was the way one of his attorneys summed up the bank's message. To estab­lish his authority al the bank, to meet the pressing timetable Melkert had abruptly imposed for action ("by the end of the week." he told Wolfowitz on Monday, August 8) and lo salvage his "preexisting relationship" with the woman he loved, Wolfowitz on August 1 1 sent Coll a curl two-page memo (".Subject: Shaha Riza") laying down the law.

"I now direct you to agree to a proposal which includes the following terms and

conditions," he wrote Coll. These included Riza's secondment to an outside institu­tion of her choosing, immediate promo­tion to H at an annual midpoint salary of SI80,000 (a raise of S47.340) and guaran­tees of I and J, depending on the length of Wollowit/'s term and whether Ri/.a earned positive ratings from ad hoc review panels to be created specially for her. "Finally," Wolfbwitz wrote, offering a last blast at the nervy Spaniard who had opened a fresh mouth to his beloved Shaha, "I wish to reiterate my deep unhappiness with the whole way of dealing with a situation that 1 still believe, and have been advised by experienced labor legal counsel, should have been resolved by my refusal." Iwenty days later Ri/.a and Coll jointly signed a

letter of agreement that made her sec­ondment to the State Department final.

"There is no fur­ther potential for conflict of interest," Wollowii/ promptly notified Melkert; the president withdrew his refusal offer and deemed the matter closed. For reasons unknown, it took 10 days for this memo to be hand-delivered to Melkert and another 63 days for Melkert to respond. "Because the outcome is con­sistent with the committee's findings and advice," Melkert wrote Wolfowitz on October 24, "the committee concurs with your view that this matter can be treated as closed." The next day Mel­kert told the bank's executive board he was pleased to report "the conflict ol inter­est has been dealt with appropriately."

In the ensuing clamor for Wolfowitz's head, Melkert's correspondence was largely ignored, despite—or perhaps because of— its oflcring incontrovertible evidence that those World Bank officers paid to exam­ine the conflict-of-interest resolutions and deem them kosher or not, gave, in this instance, (heir full seal of approval to the detestable warmonger and his ballbusting companion. Kven more damning for Mel-kert—who would later claim Wolfbwitz "excluded" key personnel from the process and thereby prevented him and the other ethics-committee members from learning the terms ol Riza's secondment—was the handwritten "Dear Paul" note the commit-

tee chairman sent Wolfowitz the following month. Dated November 25, 2005, the let­ter is this case's smoking gun:

I would like to thank you for the very open and constructive spirit of our discussions, knowing in par­ticular the sensitivity to Shaha, who 1 hope will be happy in her new assignment.

Ad

PS: Please let me know whether you could accept an invitation to you and Shaha at our place, prob­ably joined by Bob and Beth.

Here was Melkert, shortly after the deal was done, praising Wolfowitz's con­duct as "very open and constructive,"

expressing hope that Riza would enjoy her new assignment—a far cry from won­dering what the hell it was or question­ing its ethicalily—and even inviting the lovers, in the cozy language of couples' cocktail chatter ("probably joined by Bob and Beth"), to Melkert's own home.

At deposition Melkert struggled to explain the inconsistency created by his contemporaneous correspondence and his later claims of ignorance of, and out­rage over, the terms of Riza's transfer: "We had a discussion then. I remember, in the ethics committee, and we consid­ered...that it would be better to accept that outcome rather than to have a pro­tracted exchange of correspondence on

the exact interpretation of the roles of the different actors in this."

"The impression this gives," one of Melkert's interrogators said, brandishing the October 24 letter, "is that the [ethics] committee felt that the advice had been followed the way it should have been fol­lowed." If not, the examiner continued, "maybe there was an opportunity there to exercise this [oversight] function and act upon this, don't you think?"

"No," Melkert shot back. Wolfowitz had gotten Riza to accept a position outside his line of authority, "and all other mat­ters... were considered by us as in fact no longer relevant."

Melkert took a similarly disinterested view in lanuarv and Februarv 2006 when

an e-mailer, identi­fying himself only as John Smith, sent the bank's inves­tigations hotline a pair of angry, highly detailed letters complaining about Ri/.a's "egregious" compensation pack­age. This time the numbers were plain for Melkert and his high priests of ethics to see: "Her salary went from around $130,000 (net) to $180,000 (net)," Smith accu­rately reported. Ignored for three weeks, Smith vowed to go public, even if it meant "a trial by the media that would not be fair to Paul Wolfowitz and would be detrimen­tal to the reputation of the World Bank." The threat was clear: reputational risk.

On February 28 Melkert finally responded, sending Wolfowitz a letter marked rn\nnKv-

TiAi. and concluding that Smith's alle­gations did "not appear to pose ethical issues appropriate lor further consider­ation by the committee" and "did not contain new information warranting any further review." Here then was a second instance when the World Bank's ethics cops, presented with highly detailed charges, looked at the Ri/.a transfer and shrugged: Case closed. Melkert's last sentence later formed the cornerstone of Wolfowitz's defense: How could the chairman of the ethics committee have responded to Smith's dollar figures by saying they contained no "new informa­tion" and then go on to claim, as Mel-kert had at deposition, that Ri/.a's "large

initial pay increase" had somehow been hidden from him?

By that point, though, the pendulum had already swung. Called to action by the Chad episode, Wolfowitz's enemies— most notably the leadership of the bank's staff association, which represents nearly half the institution's 10,000 employees— felt emboldened by Smith's challenge to the new president's authority. Smelling blood, they lunged for the jugular. Had Wolfowitz been a beloved figure at the bank, the exculpatory conclusion Melkert and the ethics committee had reached— twice—would have ended the matter.

Instead, the leaks began. The first went to The Washington Part's Al Kamen, author of the gossipy In the Loop col­umn, which broke the story on March 28, 2007. Kamen noted that after receiving another raise at the State Department, Riza was now earning SI93,590—$7,000 more a year than Secretary of State Con-doleezza Rice. Kamen correctly reported that World Bank staffers are, as a rule, "grossly overpaid"—the bank's U.S. employees are reimbursed for their fed­eral income tax payments, for example— but he failed to mention that more than 1,000 bank staffers are at H level, some earning almost $230,000 a year, hundreds earning more than the secretary of state.

Critical pieces in the Financial Times and The Neiu York Times swiftly followed, and soon the hunt was on, with all its glorious post-Watergate trappings: the special inves­tigating committee stacked with unsympa­thetic umpires (what kind of eye would, say, Jiayi Zou, the executive director rep­resenting China, cast on Wolfowitz's and Riza's many insinuations against Sheng-man Zhang?), the East Coast editorials calling for resignation, the desertion of key aides, the increasing use of the adjective embattled and the predawn camera-crew stakeouts outside the embattled one's house in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

What even the couple's most implacable enemies didn't count on was the dread­fully impolitic way Wolfowitz and Riza

went about defending themselves behind the scenes. The first batde Wolfowitz chose to wage in his campaign for survival was a reckoning with Coll. After an alarming inquiry from U.S. News &f World Report, Wolfowitz summoned the HR executive lor an angry confrontation in which, Coll testified, "he basically accused me of leak­ing the information.... Hi-also told me...to tell friends, people like Shengman...to get out of his way and stop attacking him.... And he also stated very clearly that 'if these people fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them, too.'"

At the same time, the stubborn law­yer inside Wolfowitz reared his ugly, spit-combed head. "Mr. Wolfowitz, and the White House itself, may have erred in pur­suing a highly legalistic defense instead of a quieter political campaign," The Wall Street Journal reported on the morning of May 17, the very day Wolfowitz announced his res­ignation. Indeed, one of his first steps was to retain perhaps the era's most feared and loathed criminal defense attorney, Robert S. Bennett, the ruddy-faced veteran de le.sguenes politiques best known for representing Presi­dent Clinton in the Paula Jones litigation. "Mr. Wolfowitz...then showered the board with legal briefs complete with exhibits and appendixes," clucked the Journal.

The big guns—Secretary Rice and Pres­ident Bush—never came out blazing. "My position is, is that he ought to stay," Bush said tepidly at a Rose Garden news con­ference on April 30, the day Wolfowitz's and Riza's depositions were taken. "And I appreciate the fact," Bush concluded, "that he has advanced—he's helped the World Bank recognize that eradication of world poverty is an important priority for the bank." This was akin to compliment­ing Joe Torre for helping the Yankees recognize that winning ball games is an important priority for the team. And not until May 10 did a spokesman for Rice dis­close that the secretary had been lobbying U.S. allies on Wolfowitz's behalf. Even so, Assistant Secretary Sean McCormack was careful to say the lobbying had occurred in "a couple of her conversations in the course of her ongoing conversations," in

which she simply "mentioned her personal high regard lor Paul Wolfowitz and the work that he's doing at the World Bank." Faint praise, indeed. A senior official at the Treasury Department, where the search was already under way for a successor to Wolfowitz, sighed to a Fox News reporter. "We're all. like. Why won't this end? '

The nail in the collin was the deposition process: Wolfowitz and Riza's last chance to curry favor with the men and women on the ad hoc committee who would, with their final report, decide Wolfowitz's late. Chairman Herman Wijffcls. like Melkert a balding Dutch politician, emphasized that he was presiding over a fact-finding, not an adversarial, proceeding, but the presence of stenographers and defense counsel (permitted to attend but not to speak) and the relentlessly negative thrust of the interrogation left little doubt about the nature of the inquest. Common sense dictated that the vilified lovers not antago­nize their jurors, but Wolfowitz and Riza had other ideas—or maybe they just couldn't help themselves.

Thus when WijfTels commenced Riza's deposition by saying sympathetically, "We understand how painful this whole episode must be for you," the witness interrupted, "Do you?" When Wijffels asked if she was ready to answer questions, Riza snifled, "If I don't have the answers, there's not much I can do about it." She complained about the steady stream of leaks—violations, all, of the bank's fabled rules and codes—and snapped, "I hope to Cod you will be dealing with this issue as well." And she challenged the panel members to "have the courage to admit" they had handled the various cases of lovers and spouses "arbitrarily and without dear guidance. Exhausted by the end. Wijflels thanked the witness and dead-panned, "Your position is fairly clear."

A more experienced witness. Wolfowitz started out dry, factual and nonconfron-tational. but this facade of equanimity cracked almost immediately after he con­cluded his lengthy opening statement. He lapsed into expressions of impatience— "I'd just say it a dozen times," "I will say it 100 times" and "Look, 1 repeat"—then

made the short leap into open quarrel­ing. "Stop looking for some rule that was violated," he commanded the panel. "If people keep trying to pin blame on me, it's going to damage the institution, and it's going to damage the institution much more than it will damage me." There were also bursts of self-righteousness and bitter­ness: "I really resent deeply all the smears about this [having been] a corrupt transac­tion designed to pay olf my girlfriend.... I didn't take this job for money."

Small wonder the ad hoc committee con­cluded Wolfowitz had violated bank rules and reserved the question of punishment for the full board—a move designed to give the president time to realize he must resign. This would be his final act of public service at the bank, the means by which he could stanch the deluge ol reputauonal risk drowning them all. Bennett negotiated the final deal. Wolfowitz agreed to resign effective-June 'M), following an exchange of public statements in which he, across five pages, claimed credit for a string of policy successes, and the board, in a single page, said it "accepted" Wolfowitz's assurances he "acted ethically and in good faith." The combatants initially refrained from public appearances, as though all were relieved to see the thing simply die.

On May 21, however, Wijffels suffered a seizure of candor and told a Dutch newspaper that Wolfowitz was hounded out of the bank not for the Riza transfer but because of his "disastrous manner of leadership." "If he had otherwise been a good leader," Wijffels conceded, "this may not have come so far." Appearing on The Charlie Rose Short' nine days later, Wolfowitz acknowledged that "we had gotten to the point where it was really not possible to be effective.' When Rose sought some explanation of the scandal, "so we can understand it from you," Wol­fowitz demurred. "1 don't want to go into every gory detail," he said. Undaunted, the host probed for some sign of whether Wolfowitz and Riza were still together, and Wolfowitz suggested they were:

kosk: Must be tough for a relationship to do this kind of—go through this.

woi.kou 11/; It's not been easy. But she's quite a remarkable, wonderful person.

"Someday I'll write a book," Wolfowitz promised, presumably to include a chapter or two on what he termed "the so-called ethics issue." Rose wondered if the whole thing weren't, as Bennett privately believed, a Kuropean backlash to the Iraq war. "Maybe if it weren't me and somebody else doing it," Wolfbwitz started to say, referring to his efforts to reform the bank's bureau­cracy and promote stringent anticonuption criteria for its lending decisions. "Somebody who's not an architect of the war and all that," Rose interjected. "I'm not an archi­tect of anything," Wolfowitz snapped, "but somebody who is not so closely associated with a controversial Iraq policy, yes."

"He was nerdy, like thegeeky boy in high school,"said one stajjer. "He had trouble looking you in the eye."