written by Dale Van Atta

IN PUBLIC, Aly Teymour, son of the royal court chamberlain to the late King Farouk of Egypt, seemed perfect for the job of United Nations chief protocol officer. "When he strides through U.N. corridors in his dark, conservatively tailored three-piece suits," the New York Times wrote approvingly, "his is a striking presence."

In private, however, Teymour was allegedly making sexual advances to young male staffers. One 23-year-old American told a reporter that Teymour had groped him in a Security Council men's room in late 1990. In December 1992, when allegations were appearing in the press, a top U.N. official was asked by the Times of London what the Secretary General planned to do about Teymour. Nothing, came the reply, since Teymour's name had not been reported in the press.

Instead of investigating the matter, Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali reappointed Teymour as Assistant Secretary General with a $120,000-plus salary. But Arab and other diplomats continued to complain privately that Teymour had become an embarrassment. Finally, the Secretary General decided to fire Teymour. But, as Boutros-Ghali explained to Reader's Digest, there was some compensation. "I gave him one last international conference," Boutros-Ghali said. Last March, Teymour flew to Copenhagen, courtesy of the U.N. Teymour, who denies the allegations, is now officially "retired" -------- on full pension.

TURNSTILE REVOLT. Unfortunately the casual, long-standing tolerance of the abuse alleged in this episode is all too characteristic at the United Nations, an institution which, founded to help others, more often than not helps only itself:

*At the height of the Ethiopian famine, when U.N. employees were literally passing the hat among themselves to aid dying victims, the General Assembly voted $73.5 million to build a U.N. conference center in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Eleven years later the huge center is not yet completed, and projected costs are $107 million. It is expected to be empty much of the time.

*Last September the U.N. decided to scrap a $938,000 headquarters security system that had never been used. The staff union held up activation of the turnstile system that would read electronic ID cards, claiming fear of health hazards from radio waves.

The real reason? The turnstiles' clocks could record the exact time employees arrived and departed. "The staff just didn't want to have their time tracked," a longtime U.S. delegate told Reader's Digest.

UN-MODEL HOME. Headquartered at the famous 39-story green-glassed slab overlooking New York's East River, the United Nations now includes hundreds of agencies, committees and commissions located around the globe. In 1945, when the U.N. began, it had a staff of 1500 and an annual budget of less than $20 million. Today the U.N. has some 53,000 employees costing $10 billion a year, of which the United States pays more than 25 percent.

"The model home designed by the founders in 1945 has become a sprawling, ramshackle structure," says Britain's Sir Brian Urquhart, a former U.N. Under Secretary General and a leading advocate of reform. The result, notes former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, is "widespread waste, profiteering, overstaffing and mismanagement." They take many forms:

GRAVY TRAIN. For 17 years Mostafa Tolba was executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) based in Nairobi, Kenya. At his retirement in 1992, his annual salary approached that of the U.S. Secretary of Defense ($143,800 at the time), even though Tolba oversaw a $63-million budget, compared with the Defense Department's $282 billion.

At the end of Tolva's term, a U.N. report concluded that few of the environmental problems that UNEP was created to address had been resloved. And a UNEP official admitted that "some problems have gone from bad to worse." Despite this legacy, Tolba left with a pension of more than $50,000 a year. He was also responsible for the creation of a $200,000 environmental prize. The 1993 recipient? Tolba himself.

U.N. salaries are adjusted to compete with the best salaries in Nes York City. Most employees receive a $1270 allowance for each child up to 18 years old. The U.N. also pays up to $12,675 a school year to employees from abroad for each child attending a private primary school, and the same amount for university students. Early retirement is possible at 55, at pensions one-quarter higher than those for U.S. civil servants.

Most governments waive the payment of taxes on U.N. salaries. Thus a U.N. employee earning $72,000 a year can have take-home pay equivalent to a New York City salary of $120,000.

The United States does not waive income taxes for Americans working at the U.N., but it does reimburse them for the amount they owe. A U.N. audit in the mid-1980s identified a number of American staffers who took the extra cash by submitting fraudulent tax returns that inflated their tax payments. Some staff members were dismissed, others penalized. In May 1993, a State Department report concluded that the tax-reimbursement systme was still "rife with corruption and fraud."

PAPER MILL. Each year, a flood of U.N. documents---well over two billion pages---is published at a football-field-size printing press beneath the north lawn of U.N. headquarters. Workers at the U.N. print shop take almost five times as many sick days, twice the amount of vacation and twice as much brreak time during the day as do workers at private American print shops, reported the international management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in 1992. Despite their poor work ethic, they earn 40-percent higher wages. McKinsey recommended closing the U.N. print shop for huge savings. It wasn't done.

NEVER SAY DIE. Once created, U.N. agencies, offices and committees demonstrate an immortality that defies logic. As a young State Department offical in 1955, Ronald I. Spiers helped organize the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Tadiation, which was to produce a report and go out of business. In 1989, when he returned as a U.N. Under Secretary General, Spiers found that the temporary committee had become a Vienna-based institution with staff, budget and annual conferences. Some of its functions overlap an even larger U.N. outfit, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The moribund Military Staff Committee meets every second Friday in a basement room of the Secretariat. Its primary business over the decades? To set the time for the next meeting. The Decolonization Committee was established in 1961. Today there are only 17 colonies left, and virtually all prefer their status; but the committee still has a two-year budget of over half a million dollars. Last July, Cuban and Iranian delegates on the committee invited Puerto Rican separatists to denounce the United States, then had the speeches printed at U.N. expense.

REFUGEE BETRAYAL. Founded in 1951, the Geneva-based U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has received two Nobel Peace Prizes. With a staff of 5000 and annual appropriations of $1.2 billion, UNHCR saves many thousands of lives around the world. But mismanagement and theft have betrayed UNHCR 's once-proud legacy.

In January 1991 UNHCR food aid for Somali refugees was sold on the black market, while 50 people a day died at the Dolo refugee camp in southern Ethiopia. At the Liboi refugee camp in northern Kenya, the killer was lack of water. A well with a pump could have been installed in two days. But arguments between the Nairobi office of UNHCR and the German-run local well contractor delayed construction for months while hundreds died.

Shinga-Vele Lukika, a Zairian who worked for UNHCR for 17 years, was sent to Uganda in 1983 as the UNHCR representative. While he was in charge there, food and equipment worth more than $2 million disappeared, including 260 tons of commodities earmarked for needy refugees and more than $670,000 worth of agency vehicles.

A U.N. audit cited Lukika's office for "poor administration," and in 1986 he was recalled to Geneva and suspended---with full pay. But sympathizers raised a row. The sitting deputy high commissioner, American Arthur E. Dewey, remembers a lunch in Geneva when an African UNHCR official said fellow Africans would kill him if he pressed further investigation of Lukika. Dewey forged ahead and recommended Lukika's dismissal. But then-U.N. Secretary General Javier Pe'rez de Cu'ellar asked UNHCR to take Lukika back.

UNHCR dispatched Lukika to Africa again in 1989, sending him to Djbouti. Two years later, civil wars in Ethiopia and Somalia sent waves of refugees pouring into the country. Massive quantities of UNHCR food and commodities were sent to Lukika. Once again, a U.N. audit report found mismanagement and misappropriation---more than $689,359, including seven payments worth $346,000 made to fictitious companies.

Lukika was finally forced to resign in 1991. Never prosecuted or ordered to pay a dime in restitution, he received a full pension until his death shortly thereafter.

BUREAUCRATIC BLOAT. Funding some 5000 projects at a cost of $1 billion a year, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) is the organization's largest source of funding for the Third World. Yet with a network of offices in 132 developing countries and a bureaucracy of nearly 7000, UNDP spends more than $200 million just on its own sprawling staff.

Corruption has reached shocking proportions. One UNDP employee in Mali embezzled $560,000 before he was caught. Another in Kenya siphoned off $368,000.

Then there is the Vienna-based U.N. Industrial Development Organization (UNDIO), whose 900 employees are supposed to spur economic growth in the Third World. Acknowledging the need to downsize, UNIDO began reducing its staff by 120 in 1993. That same year, however, UNIDO Director General Mauricio de Maria y Campos hired his former boss, retired U.N. official Rana Singh, as a "short-term" consultant. Singh gets his full U.N. retirement benefit, a large salary and per diem. A confidential U.S. government memo estimates the total at $12,000 a month--even though "no one in Vienna has figured out what he does." Singh's "short-term" contracts have been renewed at least three times. Singh told Reader's Digest he has been helping "reorganize" the agency.

RESTING ON LAURELS. Two U.N. agencies often praised for their good works are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.N. International Children's Fund (UNICEF). UNICEF won a Nobel Prize in 1965. WHO's greatest triumph came in 1977, when it concluded an amazing $100-million ten-year campaign to eradicate smallpox from the world. Unfortunately, in recent years both agencies have rested on their laurels.

WHO's $1.8-billion annual budget is larger than that of any other U.N. special agency. But according to two George Mason University professors who issued a searing report on WHO, the agency spends more than 50 percent of its budget on its 6000-member staff (including consultants), many of whom work at its headquarters in Geneva.

Disease prevention and control programs account for only 34 percent of the budget. Less than one percent of WHO's budget goes to malaria, which the organization itself has called the "most serious health problem in the poorest areas of the world."

In 1992, moving news photos showed UNICEF's Special Ambassador Audrey Hepburn holding starving children in Somalia. Few people realized that when the Somali crisis began in 1991, UNICEF fled the country--along with all other U.N. agencies--leaving private charities to stick it out alone for a good part of the year.

When UNICEF returned to Somalia, employees grabbed three of the best villas there at rents of up to $5000 a month. A U.N. official on the scene complained, "[The brass] work in air-conditioned offices and live in air-conditioned villas and, apart from trips to the beach, that's the sum total of their experience in Somalia."

HALFHEARTED REFORMS. In the last few years, there have been several attempts to reform the U.N. from within. In 1993 then-Under Secretary General Dick Thornburgh, a former governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. Attorney General, backed such reform initiatives as closing the huge U.N. print-shop operation. He left in a year, after issuing a stinging critique. Joseph Connor, a former chairman of Price Waterhouse and now U.N. Under Secretary, also hopes to change the U.N.----creating a professional performance-appraisal sustem, training managers and staff, and restructuring lines of authority. But Connor is the seventh person to hold that position in as many years, so history suggests he'll leave the job unfinished.

Last year U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright told Congress she could not "justify to the taxpayers of my country some of the personnel arrangements, the sweetheart pension deals, the lack of accountability, the waste of resourses, the duplication of effort and the lack of attention to the bottom line that we often see around here."

Albright's comments are right on target. But they have yet to be acted upon. "Unless they are," warns former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Charles Lichenstein, "the American public"---and the world---"may well decide the U.N. has outlived its usefulness."