“If that happened,” Janson continued, “you knew that maybe ten thousand people would have been massacred unnecessarily.” He did not need to detail the situation: A cluster of small-arms depots had been identified, freshly stocked by a Mali-based dealer. The U.N.’s on-the-ground commanders had received reliable intelligence that the rebel leader was going to use them to settle a tribal feud—in the small hours of the very next morning. The rebel leader’s men would use the arms to launch a deep incursion into the Bayokuta region, shooting his enemies, demolishing villages, amputating the limbs of children. And it could all be prevented by a swift, low-risk sally that would eliminate the illegal arms warehouses. The moral and military calculation was not in doubt. But neither was the bureaucratic protocol.

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” Janson went on. “What does Mathieu Zinsou do? He’s the consummate bureaucrat—just ask anybody. A perfect organization man. A stickler for the rules. Only, he’s also a fox. Within an hour, your office sent a cable to the High Commission for Peacekeeping consisting of 123 reports and action items—every insubstantial bit of paperwork you had at hand, I’d guess. Buried in the cable, item number ninety-seven, was an ‘Unless Otherwise Ordered’ notification, spelling out the proposed U.N. military action in the blandest terms and giving the exact time during which it would be executed. You subsequently told your general stationed outside Freetown that the U.N. central command had been notified of his plans and had voiced no objection. This was literally true. It was also true that the high commissioner’s staff didn’t even stumble on the relevant advisory until three days after the operation.”

“I can’t imagine where this is leading,” Zinsou said, sounding bored.

“At which point, the event was part of history—an impressive success, a casualty-free raid that averted the death of many thousands of unarmed civilians. Who wouldn’t want to claim credit for it? A lily-livered U.N. high commissioner proudly told his colleagues that of course he had authorized the raid, even intimated that it had been his idea. And as he found himself roundly congratulated, he couldn’t help but feel kindly disposed toward Mathieu Zinsou.”

Zinsou fixed Janson with a stare. “The secretary-general neither denies nor confirms. But such a story, I submit, would not confirm one’s faith in human predictability.”

“On the contrary—I came to recognize the hallmarks of your personal style of operating. Later, in the flash-point crises in Tashkent, in Madagascar, in the Comoros, I noticed the extraordinary gift you had for making the best of a bad situation. I saw what others didn’t—it wasn’t so much that you followed rules as that you’d figured out how to make the rules follow you.”

He shrugged. “In my country, we have a proverb. Loosely translated, it means: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”