United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization founded on October 24, 1945, by 51 original member states following World War II. Its founding charter established six principal organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. The Security Council holds primary responsibility for international peace and security; its five permanent members (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) hold veto power over substantive resolutions. Headquarters is located in New York City.¹

Cold War Role

The UN Security Council's veto structure largely paralyzed the organization as a collective security mechanism during the Cold War, as the United States and Soviet Union each blocked resolutions adverse to their clients. The United States used its veto to protect Israel from resolutions censuring its occupation policies; the Soviet Union used its veto to protect clients including Cuba, Syria, and Vietnam. This dynamic meant that most of the proxy conflicts documented in this vault - the Contra war in Nicaragua, the covert operations in El Salvador and Guatemala, Soviet operations in Afghanistan - proceeded without effective UN constraint.¹

UNSCOM and Iraq Inspections

Following the Gulf War, the UN Security Council established the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) under Resolution 687 (April 1991) to verify the elimination of Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs and ballistic missiles. UNSCOM operated in Iraq from 1991 until December 1998, when Saddam Hussein's government expelled the inspectors. The inspections were technically groundbreaking but operationally compromised: UNSCOM's executive chairman Richard Butler and earlier chair Rolf Ekeus later acknowledged that the Central Intelligence Agency had used UNSCOM's communications infrastructure to conduct intelligence collection beyond the mandate of weapons verification.²

UNSCOM was succeeded by UNMOVIC (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) in 1999. UNMOVIC inspectors under Hans Blix were in Iraq when the United States and United Kingdom invaded in March 2003, asserting that Saddam Hussein retained prohibited weapons programs. No such programs were found.

Oil-for-Food Scandal

The Oil-for-Food Programme, established under Security Council Resolution 986 (1995) and operational from December 1996, permitted Iraq to sell oil in order to purchase food and medicine under UN supervision. A 2004-2005 independent inquiry chaired by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found that the programme had been corrupted by systematic kickback schemes in which Iraqi officials collected surcharges on oil contracts and suppliers inflated invoices. The inquiry identified approximately 2,200 companies and individuals from 66 countries as having paid surcharges to the Iraqi government, including officials at UN member states and individuals connected to Benon Sevan, the programme's executive director, who was found to have received allocations.²

Other Relevant Bodies

The United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control (UNFDAC), a precursor to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, received funding from sources connected to the CIA-backed anti-narcotics efforts that intersected with the Contra resupply networks. UNICEF's institutional name was exploited by the CRIES pedophile network in Belgium, which used a UNICEF umbrella for operations until the connection was exposed in 1986.