Kofi Annan’s post-UN publicity shop bestirred itself this week to deny a report by the New York Sun that Annan had bought a multi-million dollar home in Morocco.

That’s helpful of Kofi Annan to be so forthcoming, at last, with information pertaining to his personal finances and real estate arrangements. But it would look a lot better if Annan were at least as helpful about telling us not only what he doesn’t own, but what he does — and how and when he got it.

This is the Kofi Annan who as Secretary-General set up a financial “disclosure” policy for UN senior staff which did not actually entail disclosing anything to the public — and even under those conditions, he refused for months to file any “disclosure” form himself, finally doing so only confidentially, in-house, and only after many queries from the press.

This is the Kofi Annan who while still serving as Secretary-General of the UN apparently saw no problem with pocketing a $500,000 environmental prize from the ruler of Dubai, and gave it up only after running into the embarrassment of press reports that he had subsequently appointed as head of the UN Environment Program a member of the prize jury. Annan never did admit that taking the money was a conflict of interest in the first place.

This is the Kofi Annan who never did answer questions about what finally became of any UN documentation pertaining to the Mercedes shipped duty-free by his son, Kojo Annan, into Ghana under false use of Kofi Annan’s name and UN perquisites.

This is the same Kofi Annan who never did explain why, before he became Secretary-General, he and his Swedish wife felt justified occupying a spacious NY State taxpayer-subsidized apartment while drawing a high-level tax-exempt UN salary. This is the same Kofi Annan who managed to depart the UN without ever giving a straight answer to the question of how that NY State taxpayer-subsidized apartment, on Roosevelt Island, somehow ended up in the hands of the family of his brother, Kobina Annan — who for part of that time has been serving as Ghana’s ambassador to Morocco.

Had Kofi Annan served for years as CEO of a private company, it might be expected that he limit his disclosures to denials and statements about what he doesn’t own. But Annan worked until last December in a position involving public trust at a public institution, where everything from his jet travel to his self-glorifying speech-writing shop was funded by public money. He has spent years trotting around the world lecturing us all on how to behave. If Anann wants to do more of that, it would be a lot more seemly for Annan to produce that financial disclosure form he refused last year to disclose, and tell us not only what he doesn’t own by now, but what he does.

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Let no one fault the UN for lack of enterprise and ingenuity. A series of federal investigations over the past few years have been delving into the activities of a growing list of UN officials engaged in all sorts of lively and creative endeavors, from setting up secret offshore front companies, to laundering money meant to buy UN peacekeeping supplies, to allegedly keeping counterfeit U.S. $100 bills in a UN Development Program (UNDP) office safe in North Korea.

Today brings the arrest of a UN employee, Vyacheslav Manokhin, alleged by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan to have taken part in a scheme using the UN letterhead to help “numerous non-United States citizens” enter the U.S. on fraudulent grounds. The federal complaint names two other defendants (all must be presumed innocent) and describes a scheme that involves, among other things, the office of the UNDP in Uzbekistan. That’s the same UNDP, flagship agency of the UN, also embroiled in the Cash-for-Kim scandal, involving alleged payments of cash to the government of North Korea.

No country contributes more to the UN than the U.S., which provides 22% of the core budget, 25% of the peacekeeping budget (soon likely to be 27%), and hosts the UN’s lavish tax-exempt spread in New York (where the UN now plans to spend $1.9 billion renovating its premises, with U.S. taxpayers expected to foot the lion’s share of the bill). With most of the UN’s 192 member states either indifferent to UN corruption, or actively complicit, and UN top management more adept at covering up than cleaning up, the only serious check on UN corruption at this point appears to be the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York. And despite the valiant efforts of the feds, it is beyond their powers, as well as beyond U.S. jurisdiction, to police the entire global sprawl of the UN’s more than $20 billion system of endless murky agencies, departments, offices, conferences and diplomatically immune, unaccountable cross-border movements of people and material. Meanwhile, we can now start wondering who, exactly, has been entering the U.S. on fraudulent grounds, and why — courtesy of the UN.

Do we have a problem here?

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Sipping soda and chatting away to the press, one of the most indefatigable briefers on the international scene is the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea, Chris Hill. Part of Hill’s diplomatic art includes ladling out a certain amount of merriment in his endless rounds of morning walkthroughs, evening walkthroughs, airport interviews, statements, q and a’s, and full-bore press briefings. On July 23rd, having just returned from Beijing, Hill gave a briefing for which the State Department’s transcript includes seven instances of mirth so pronounced that the transcribers took the trouble to note, in parentheses, the “laughter” soundtrack.

Humor is a fine thing, in its place. But the words that punctuate this gaiety are disturbing in the extreme. The subject here is North Korea, and a regime that has starved to death an estimated one to two million of its own people (possibly more), cheated on its 1994 nuclear freeze deal, indulged in criminal rackets that according to the U.S. government include counterfeiting U.S. currency, and last year set horrifying and dangerous precedents for rogue states by testing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear bomb. In response to the deal struck by Hill in February, North Korea’s totalitarian government has already engaged in its usual tactics of insult and delay, while ratcheting up its demands. So far, Pyongyang has extorted a host of concessions, including bilateral talks, arrangements for free fuel and other aid, and, at Hill’s urgent behest, the unfreezing and transfer to Kim, with the help of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, of some $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds. In exchange, Kim has shut down the same Yongbyon reactor that he shut down in the mid-1990s as prelude to cheating on the Agreed Framework nuclear freeze deal conceived by Jimmy Carter and signed on to by President Clinton. But there is no sign yet of North Korea providing the promised full accounting for all its nuclear ventures.

So what has Hill been saying about that, amid the comic by-play? Well, one disturbing development is that it gets ever harder to tell from his language whether he is negotiating on behalf of the U.S., or of North Korea. From that same July 23rd briefing, here’s his “big thing” rationale for why North Korea has not yet provided that nuclear accounting:

“Bear in mind, they just did a big thing last week. They shut down an entire complex, and sometimes when you’ve just done a big thing, you don’t want to wake up the next day and go on and do another big thing.”

(Note: In his linguistic flip, above, from “they” to “you,” the “you” with whom he apparently wants us to identify, or at least sympathize, is … Kim Jong Il).

Later in the briefing, a reporter asked if Hill had any sense that North Korea is about to provide the promised nuclear accounting. Hill’s reply belongs to the genre of “what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” except here it’s the meaning of “all”:

“Well, you know, we’re not going to talk about what they’re prepared to do. I mean, let me just talk about what we’re prepared to do and when we look at a declaration, it has to — and all means all and we’re not prepared to look the other way and pretend that a partial declaration is all, so — I mean, we, I think, owe it to ourselves, owe it to our citizens to be very vigilant and to insist on all meaning all.”

Somehow, this is not a locution that inspires confidence. It conjures visions of Hill sitting at the negotiating table with Pyongyang’s emissaries and trying to gentle them along with this brand of vaguely imploring diplomatic baby talk, while they speak for a regime that lives off slave labor, narcotics peddling, counterfeiting, and nuclear extortion. But OK, let’s cut Chris Hill some slack. It’s a long flight between Beijing and Washington, and that time zone change is a doozy.

Except now we get to where the bottom drops out. Hill wends his way to the subject of human rights in North Korea (which, in keeping with Pyongyang’s preferences, he refers to not as North Korea, but as the DPRK — short for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). He starts off sounding pretty good, noting that even if North Korea scraps its nuclear program,

“That doesn’t mean that we end our problems with the DPRK. We will continue to have issues. We have human rights concerns in DPRK.”

But from there, it’s straight downhill:

“I mean, there are certain standards, international standards. We don’t think the DPRK is quite up to those. And that’s going to be a continuing issue. But unless we can solve this nuclear issue, I don’t think we can even get to those.”

This statement –chilling in its implications — comes in between laugh lines involving Hill’s chipper relations with the press. What Hill has just said is that in all his talks with North Korea (the big-thing-doing DPRK), human rights are not even on the table.

That’s not funny. It’s horrifying. This grotesque version of diplomatic etiquette, including Hill’s toadying description of North Korea as “not quite up to” international standards, is more likely to aggravate the threat from North Korea than to end it. The message to Pyongyang, and to anyone else listening in, is that Hill is so eager to produce a deal — no matter how false — that he doesn’t dare upset Kim Jong Il.

For a serious test of the value of these talks with North Korea, here’s something worth tabling while Kim Jong Il recovers from the exertions of switching off Yongbyon (again). Why not demand that Kim open up North Korea’s Camp 22 to a snap visit by the international press? That would be far more informative than this endless flow of merry briefings from Chris Hill. It would also be a bargaining chip far more in keeping with our own democratic principles than the rotten old habit of trying to buy peace by sending tribute — which we call aid — to Kim’s regime.

What is Camp 22? You can read about it and take a satellite-photo tour, on Joshua Stanton’s One Free Korea blog. It’s a labor camp in northeasten North Korea, believed to hold about 50,000 men, women and children — part of a North Korean gulag that for cruelty rivals the labor camps of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. These camps are the dark core of the Kim dynasty’s long reign of hideous secrets, duplicity and terror. Until they are opened and dismantled, no promises from Pyongyang at the bargaining table will be worth trusting. Until Hill starts negotiating from that premise, it doesn’t matter how many chortles he gets at his press briefings. The last hideous laugh will be Kim’s.

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It’s been fascinating to see such drama over the possibility of change at a business which is all about covering change itself, otherwise known as reporting the news.

I can understand some of this, both as a reader and former staffer of the Journal, where I worked from 1984-2002. The Journal sale to Rupert Murdoch brought a flash of nostalgia for the days when I first walked into the Chicago bureau in 1980, for a brief stint as a news intern, was shown to a desk with a big heavy telephone, pencils, scissors and tape, and began clacking out stories about commodity markets on a manual typewriter.

The Journal was then six columns wide (not five), one section (not three), all black-and-white (no pastels), and published five days a week (not six). Back then, I believe the only photograph it had ever published was an aerial snapshot run on the editorial page, showing the Chappaquiddick road where Senator Ted Kennedy in 1969 took the fatal turn toward his spill off the Dike bridge, where Mary Joe Kopechne drowned.

Newspapers are not only a source of news, they are part of the comforting routine of daily life. They land on the doorstep and we bring them into our homes and offices, read them over coffee, meld them into our habits and lives. Except, like the long-gone clink of the bottles once left by the long-vanished milkmen of my childhood, all that has been changing anyway. It’s called the creative destruction of the marketplace, it is what brought us The Wall Street Journal to begin with, and in our marvelous system of free men and free markets, it is less to be feared than welcomed — more in my column today for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Footnote about the good old days: They were wonderful, and in honor of the news trade, I’m tempted to go rent that 1940 movie classic, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, “His Girl Friday” — which includes some aspects of human nature that never change. The trade-offs in newspapering since then have been driven by consumer choice, and our world is richer for it. But if anyone thinks there might still be significant demand for a one-section, all-black-and-white, five-day-a-week, print-only, family-controlled, national financial newspaper, filled with stories written on manual typewriters, then there is by now an obvious investment opportunity just waiting.

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