Kofi Annan is sitting in a jet at 24,000 feet when we talk. It's late November and the United Nations secretary general is on a diplomatic tour of Africa that, over the course of nine days, will take him to Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Chad, Eritrea, Sudan, Morocco, and Burkina Faso. Most of his time has been spent on the plane. Below is the Africa of Kilimanjaro and the Great Lakes. It's also the Africa where wars are being waged, people are dying of AIDS and refugees are dragging themselves across the Sahara.

At one stop, he meets with the entire Security Council and with representatives of the rebels and the government parties in Sudan's civil war. Other meetings will sometimes put him in uncomfortable company -- with leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Umar al-Bashir from Sudan. But Annan is diplomat and he knows how to put on a show and a smile. For even after 42 years with the UN, many of them spent in the United States, he still considers Africa his home.

But there's a storm cloud lingering over his trip: the UN's oil-for-food program. The latest name to surface in the corruption scandal is that of the 66-year-old secretary general's son, Kojo Annan. The implication of the 29-year-old in the scandal -- the largest to strike the UN in years -- has undermined Annan's credibility and many in the US are calling for his resignation. Of course, that chorus has been growing in numbers since Annan told the BBC in September he believed the Iraq war had been "illegal."

Thousands of feet above his homeland -- he was born in Ghana, which was then the British Gold Coast Colony in 1938 -- Annan admits his job has grown more difficult.

"It can be very frustrating; you can lose your patience," Annan says, addressing his fatigue. In jobs like these, he says, it's important to be able to keep your balance. But these days he manages that less and less frequently. The old days in Switzerland, when he could go up into the mountains where cell phones don't work are a distant memory.

Washington's whipping boy

How do you react to fatigue? I ask. "You keep going. You look for new ways. You try to connect with those who have the means to achieve certain goals," he says. But as relaxed as he may seem on this flight, these are troubling times for Annan. The United Nations' secretary general, appointed with the backing of the United States eight years ago, has now become Washington's favorite enemy. And though Annan may be able to make it through the battle, he can't win the war. The United Nations is no match for the American spin doctors -- and the scandal-plagued organization has become an easy and vulnerable target.

Annan is still in office -- his ethical principles and ability to speak out are intact -- but without an army or even a vote in the Security Council, he has virtually no power. The greatest weapon in his arsenal is his character. Not even his biggest detractors would contest the sincerity of his conviction in the creation of a peaceful world -- a concept he sees as more than a mere ideal. He is also a man of remarkable self-composure -- he never gets angry, never raises his voice, he doesn't hurt people's feelings and doesn't allow anyone to hurt his. Every now and then Annan says, "joking aside," and it's only then you realize he's just told a joke.

Those close to Annan admire him as a boss and a leader. Escinder, an Ethiopian photographer for the UN, says he can see Annan's exhaustion in his pictures. "We have to protect him," he says. Joe, Annan's American bodyguard, declares that he would "take a bullet" for Annan without a moment's hesitation because this boss was the first head of the UN to invite all the bodyguards and their families to come to his home for Christmas. "And he always says 'please' and 'thank you'."

There's no question that American right-wingers, accustomed to swaggering Texan talk, consider a man like Annan to be a weakling. The lapel pins tell the whole story: George W. Bush wears an American flag, Kofi Annan a dove, the symbol of peace. They are increasing the stakes, and during his flight, Annan at one point even uses the word "campaign" to describe their actions. "We are not prepared for such a confrontation," he says. "I prefer to be careful about what I say because I don't want an escalation."

When his trip began, the secretary general was under fire because of attacks on his organization. For too long, critics complain, he has stood by people who made too many mistakes. His enemies want to weaken him, and their hour has come.

A tattered world

Annan wanted to go to Africa to help bring peace to his continent and to strengthen the United Nations. But the speeches he gives these days include words like "urgency" and "responsibility" and "the international community." The secretary general is "concerned," "indignant," "disappointed." The words are threadbare and they show how thoroughly messed up the world is in 2004.

The declaration signed at the International Conference on the Great Lakes region in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which calls on countries in the area to respect each other's borders in order to prevent further conflict, has been precooked in Kofi's world kitchen. It's always the same at these conferences -- the outcome is predetermined. Things proceed slowly at the UN. Things aren't done in the American way, and there is no flexing of muscles to force solutions. But it is certainly a step forward that Africa's rulers are talking to one another, that they are actually signing documents and commiting themselves to democracy. "This isn't the end, it isn't even the beginning of the end, it is the beginning of a beginning," Annan says.

Elisabeth Lindenmayer, the head of Annan's cabinet, says he leads in what she describes as the "African" style. "He asks us what we think, listens, is silent and thinks, and then he announces clear decisions." It's a trait his critics don't care for -- they often complain there is too little debate at the UN. Take, for example, the decision to send UN staff to Iraq -- most of the people in New York were against the decision, but Annan favored it and so there was no debate.

These differences of opinion are whittling away at Annan's influence and what used to be his most powerful currency: the amount of time he was alloted for meetings with the world's decision-makers.

How long can the secretary general speak; how long is each bilateral meeting? When will Colin Powell have time to see him; where is Joschka Fischer waiting; who gets how many minutes with whom? The currency is diminishing, but his people do what they can.

Reforming the UN

Kofi Annan has two more years before his second and last term in office ends. He has made some changes. For example, he has slimmed down the organization. What he still wants to do is institute genuine reform: to expand the Security Council to 24 members, to make it more representative so that the developing countries of the Southern Hemisphere will respect it. Annan would like to help Germany get a seat on the Council, and he wants to do the same for Africans and Asians. He's also aiming to make all the arms of the behemoth and bureaucratic UN quick and efficient. "The world has changed and the UN must change," he says -- to universal agreement.

But to accomplish this he must have power. Annan's appointment was approved by 191 nations, and in accordance with the UN charter he briefs the Security Council on conflicts that endanger world peace. That is why he constantly finds himself between two camps, and why he must constantly forge alliances. He needs the support of two-thirds of the General Assembly and the entire Security Council to pass his reforms. A veto would ruin everything. But when was the last time the Americans voluntarily surrendered any of their power?

Annan's people think he is "the best secretary general there ever was." He's not a visionary, but a practical man who is a skilled persuader. But his power is diminishing. Under his tenure as secretary general, the UN has been plagued by sex scandals among peacekeeping troops, mismanagement and, now, possibly corruption.

Part II: Painful attacks against Annan and the UN

The United Nations presents the Americans with too many reasons to find fault. The oil-for-food program that permitted Iraq to exchange oil exports for food during the embargo years, is the best example, because Saddam Hussein pocketed about $10 billion dollars in illegal earnings. Worse yet, the names of many UN workers are appearing on the lists of those implicated in the scandal. But if you look at it factually, the scandal over Annan's son Kojo would hardly account for a disaster.

Kojo has offices in Miami, Lagos, and London and, until early 2004, he received $2,500 a month from the Swiss firm Cotecna. His father says he did not know about this, that he is "disappointed." Cotecna was supposed to manage the oil-for-food program. Annan's aides say Kofi had asked Kojo several times whether and for how long he had been receiving money from Cotecna, and Kojo had mumbled something and lied.

If we deal only with the facts, then the case of Kojo would probably be endurable -- so far, the only thing that is clear is that Kojo represented Cotecna in Africa. Nothing points to Kojo's having any ties to Iraq or suggests that his father exerted his influence in assigning contracts. The case of the Cypriot Benon S. Sevan should be more troublesome for Annan. Sevan was executive director of the oil-for-food program and documents suggest he received private oil bribes. The Sevan affair is a disaster for the UN.

Smearing Kofi

But for the time being all the fuss is about Annan. The entangling of his son in the scandal has emerged like a dream come true for Kofi's worst enemies. Of course, they have other ammunition, too; his career at the UN hasn't been without its blemishes. In the early 1990s, Annan was in charge of the UN's peacekeeping operations and he ignored calls for help from his commander in Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi as well as Hutu were dying. Either he did not or was not able to do anything to stop the murder of 8,000 Muslim Bosnians who were murdered in Srebrenica. "We all made mistakes," Annan says, "the world community failed."

The campaign against Annan works like this: Groups like Move America Forward now describe the UN as a "safe harbor for terrorist organizations," the New York Post newspaper runs headlines like "Kofi's cash laundry," and the conservative columnist William Safire brands the scandal "Kofigate."

But this is an act of revenge, and it reeks of the way John Kerry was painted as a liberal twerp during the presidential election. Only now, Annan is being made out as an enemy of the US and the head of a corrupt UN organization, which is sabotaging America's war against terror.

America's view for the United Nations

Now that Annan has returned to his seat on the plane, he is shown a document, a record of background conversations with a Washington insider. "Bush has complete control of foreign policy," it says. "I see no one in the new administration who wants the United Nations to play an important role." For instance, the [U.S.] government would cooperate in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee's aiding of refugees, but not with the UN acting as a political power in a world where there is no longer a Cold War, a world that can be reshaped." Annan can never say it aloud, but he knows that while Africa may want a general, George W. Bush wants him to be a secretary.

And this has everything to do with Iraq. Bush is waging the war without the United Nations and he charges it is in danger of becoming "irrelevant." Kofi Annan warned about going to war and when the BBC asked him whether the war was illegal, he said this war was not in conformity with UN resolutions. Illegal then? Not in conformity with the charter, was the answer. Well, illegal? "From the (UN) charter point of view, it was illegal."

During our conversation in the plane, Annan discusses the current developments in Iraq. What is important, he says, is security. But military forces alone aren't enough, he warns. "You have to keep trying to convince people who are on the other side." Seventeen UN staff members died in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. In spite of that Annan knows that reinforcements must be sent. "I will do that," he says, "but for security reasons I can't say how many and when."

"It's difficult and painful"

Finally, Annan says that he has not yet given up on UN reform. There is, of course, still a possibility of getting the United States to go along with it. "The Americans have to see the entire package and consider what's in it for them." He goes on talking like this for three-quarters of an hour -- about the problems of a sad world. And then, very guardedly, he begins to talk about himself.