Under rules governing the program, contracts that contained products with a possible military use needed the Security Council's approval.

Other nonmilitary contracts that exceeded a set value also needed approval.

The U.N. official tells NewsMax that the director of the U.N.'s Iraq aid program, Benon Sevan, on several occasions took contracts whose value exceeded the set figure and split them to come under the cutoff line for the Security Council's approval.

Sevan was repeatedly warned by staffers to have an independent, outside auditor review the contracts. He refused.

Published reports claim that as much as $10 billion might have been siphoned from the aid program.

The DRC is in the midst of a bloody civil war the U.N. is trying to mediate.

More than 600 personnel are said to work in the U.N. center, which is fairly small with cramped workspace.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been reluctant to approve the expenditures needed to improve the security situation.

This comes as Annan and his staff were severely criticized in a recently completed investigation into the bombing of the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters last August.

That attack, the worst in U.N. history, left 22 killed and 150 wounded.

The planes are frequently old Soviet-built military transports, without seats and commonly overloaded.

What U.N. personnel are not told is that insurance companies refuse to cover such transportation. U.N. staffers and contract employees can and have found themselves injured or killed with little or no benefits, other than that which the world organization might elect to offer.

More than $8 million has gone missing from operations in Angola.

More than $3.5 million disappeared from the U.N. center in Mogadishu, Somalia.

More than $20 million disappeared from the U.N.'s Cambodia relief effort.

$10 million disappeared from a UNICEF operation in Nairobi, Kenya.

This in addition to the $10 billion that might have been skimmed from the Iraqi aid program.

The official said a cockpit voice recorder recovered near the site of the crash was sent to the U.N. in New York for analysis and then disappeared.

At first, Annan denied any knowledge of a black box. At the time he was a U.N. undersecretary-general in charge of peacekeeping. It was his department that was commissioned to launch an investigation.

Last month, a flight recorder was indeed discovered in a locked file cabinet, where it apparently had been since 1994.

The U.N. has cast doubt on whether the black box found was indeed the one from the 1994 crash.

NewsMax has learned that despite denials, the voice recorder discovered was in fact the one from the 1994 crash.

Annan not only knew of the recovery of the recorder in 1994, but ordered its tape analyzed.

A French translator was retained for $25,000 to listen to the flight recorder.

NewsMax was told that most of the conversation was no more than "technical" exchanges between the pilot and air traffic controllers.

Annan, for reasons not made clear, asked for a second translation (French-English) of the tape. When a second French translator was not immediate available, Annan ordered a member of his staff, Denis Beissel, to put the voice recorder in a "safe and secure" place until a second translator became available.

Apparently, the black box became forgotten until the French resurrected the issue in February.

"There is no accountability and as such things like this happen. Nobody wants to take responsibility," the U.N. official reluctantly admitted.

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