THREE United Nations fieldworkers are publishing details of sex, drugs and corruption inside United Nations missions despite a UN attempt to block their book.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth chronicles the experiences of a doctor, a human rights official and a secretary in UN operations in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia. The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15 per cent of their local staff’s salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers; and that incompetent UN security has cost lives.

Their first-person account of a decade in UN service also includes candid details of drug use — particularly a marijuana cocktail called “The Space Shuttle” — and casual sex. It says that UN staff in Cambodia resembled “the jet set on vacation”.

“Almost a million civilians [whom] our peacekeepers were supposed to protect died in two genocides,” Andrew Thomson, one of the coauthors, told The Times.

“We didn’t set out to write a scandalous book about the UN but this is a matter of historical record. Did the UN really think that none of us would come home angry and write about it?

The book takes its title from an episode in Somalia in which Heidi Postlewait, an American secretary, seeks consolation with a local interpreter after a sniper attack.

“I can feel this pounding inside me and I can’t wait. It has to be right now, not in ten minutes, not five. Now,” she wrote. “An emergency. Emergency sex.”

Ms Postlewait’s sexual exploits in various battlezones add spice to the book. At one point, the divorced former New York social worker has sex with a soldier on a water bladder at their Mogadishu base. “After, we lay back naked, sweat drying, smoking cigarettes. Nice,” she writes. “Then I spotted an observation tower not 50ft away, where two soldiers with night-vision goggles were peeping down at us . . . I think they set me up.”

The three fieldworkers do much good work — monitoring elections in Cambodia, visiting a Haitian prison, exhuming a mass grave in Bosnia — and the book never quite overcomes their latent sense of self-congratulation.

But as they are hurled into one crisis after another they become increasingly demoralised. Particularly galling to them is the murder in Mogadishu of a young American colleague, shot dead as he rode in a UN convoy. Kenneth Cain, an American human rights official, complains bitterly that the board of inquiry ignored failings in UN security.

“The board is stacked with UN officials who oversee security,” he writes. “I don’t trust these f***s for a second to truly investigate and hold one of their own accountable.”

After he is evacuated from Haiti because of worsening violence, Dr Thomson advises readers: “If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.” Bulgaria has denied that it sent freed prisoners as peacekeepers to Cambodia but some of the other allegations in the book have effectively been substantiated.

For instance, an inquiry into the bombing of the UN office in Baghdad last year found the whole UN security system to be “dysfunctional”.

The UN hierarchy tried to block the book using a rule requiring that UN staff get approval before writing about their work. Permission was denied. The UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said: “We thought it was selective and sensational, with judgements regarding their fellow staff members, which we did not think they had to right to make while they were on staff.”

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