[NYTr] To Iran and Its Foes, an Indispensable Irritant

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Sep 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17elbaradei.html


To Iran and Its Foes, an Indispensable Irritant

By ELAINE SCIOLINO and WILLIAM J. BROAD

VIENNA — Late in August, Mohamed ElBaradei put the finishing touches on
a nuclear accord negotiated in secret with Iran.

The deal would be divisive and risky, one of the biggest gambles of his
10 years as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran would answer questions about its clandestine nuclear past in
exchange for a series of concessions. With no advance notice or media
strategy, Dr. ElBaradei ordered the plan released in the evening. And
then he waited.

The next day, diplomats from the United States, France, Britain and
Germany marched into his office atop a Vienna skyscraper to deliver a
joint protest. The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling
that threatened to undermine a United Nations Security Council strategy
to punish, not reward, Tehran.

Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian-born lawyer, was polite but firm. “If Iran
wants to answer questions, what am I supposed to do, tell them it
can’t?” he asked.

Then, brandishing one of his characteristic mangled metaphors, he
dismissed his critics as “living room coaches who shoot from the hip.”

Almost five years after he stood up to the Bush administration on Iraq
and then won the Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble, Dr. ElBaradei now
finds himself at the center of the West’s turbulent confrontation with
Iran, derided yet relied upon by all sides.

To his critics in the West, he is guilty of serious diplomatic sins —
bias toward Iran, recklessness and, above all, a naïve grandiosity that
leads him to reach far beyond his station. Over the past year, even
before he unveiled his deal with Tehran, Western governments had
presented him with a flurry of formal protests over his stewardship of
the Iran case.

Even some of his own staff members have become restive, questioning his
leadership and what they see as his sympathy for the Iranians,
according to diplomats here.

Yet the Iranians also seek to humiliate him and block his inspectors.

“He is the man in the middle,” said Lee H. Hamilton, a former
Democratic congressman long respected for his foreign affairs acumen.
“The United States and Iran simply do not believe one another. There is
deep distrust.” And, he added, that makes the situation “very
difficult” for any go-between.

Even so, while Dr. ElBaradei’s harshest detractors describe him as
drunk with the power of his Nobel, what keeps him on center stage is a
pragmatic truth: He is everyone’s best hope.

He has grown ever more indispensable as American credibility on atomic
intelligence has nose-dived and European diplomacy with Tehran has
stalled.

For the world powers, he is far and away the best source of knowledge
about Iran’s nuclear progress — information Washington uses regularly
to portray Tehran as an imminent global danger.

Even the Iranians need him (as he likes to remind them) because his
maneuvers promise to lessen and perhaps end the sting of United Nations
sanctions.

Dr. ElBaradei, who is 65, seems unfazed, even energized, by all the
dissent. He alludes to a sense of destiny that has pressed him into the
role of world peacemaker. He has called those who advocate war against
Iran “crazies,” and in two long recent interviews described himself as
a “secular pope” whose mission is to “make sure, frankly, that we do
not end up killing each other.”

He added, “You meet someone in the street — and I do a lot — and
someone will tell me, ‘You are doing God’s work,’ and that will keep me
going for quite a while.”

It is precisely that self-invented role that enrages his detractors.
They say he has stepped dangerously beyond the mandate of the I.A.E.A.,
a United Nations agency best known for inspecting atomic installations
in an effort to find and deter secret work on nuclear arms.

“Instead of being the head of a technical agency, whose job is to
monitor these agreements, and come up with objective assessments, he
has become a world policy maker, an advocate,” said Robert J. Einhorn,
the State Department’s nonproliferation director from 1999 to 2001.

In particular, Dr. ElBaradei is faulted for his new deal with Iran,
which has defied repeated Security Council demands to suspend its
enrichment of uranium. Critics say the plan threatens to buy Iran more
time to master that technology, which can make fuel for reactors or
atomic bombs.

Despite Iran’s long history of nuclear deception, Dr. ElBaradei’s
supporters cite his vindication on Iraq — no evidence of an active
Iraqi nuclear program has been found — as reason to listen to him now.

“He could have saved us a disastrous war if we had paid attention to
him,” said Thomas M. Franck, an international law professor emeritus at
New York University Law School, who taught Dr. ElBaradei there decades
ago and has remained a close friend.

After the Iran accord became public, The Washington Post published an
editorial branding Dr. ElBaradei a “Rogue Regulator.” His wife, Aida,
who is his closest political adviser, came up with a response —
T-shirts that succinctly frame the ElBaradei debate: “Rogue regulator”
will be stenciled on the front, “Or smooth operator?” on the back.

Ambitious, but Reserved

When Dr. ElBaradei received the Nobel Prize in December 2005, he used
his acceptance speech to lay out an ambitious agenda — helping the
poor, saving the environment, fighting crime and confronting new
dangers spawned by globalization.

“We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing
bigger weapons, or dispatching more troops,” he said. “Quite to the
contrary, by their very nature, these security threats require
primarily international cooperation.”

Yet Dr. ElBaradei’s expansive view of himself is a striking
counterpoint to his personal style.

That Nobel night, he was celebrating with friends in his suite at the
Grand Hotel in Oslo when thousands of people appeared on the street
below, holding candles and cheering. Unsure of himself, he froze.

“He was clearly nonplused and adrift at what to do,” Mr. Franck
recalled. “His wife told him to wave back.”

A tall, shy man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Dr. ElBaradei is so
averse to small talk that he refuses even superficial conversation with
staff members in the agency’s elevators, aides say.

Rather than venture into the dining room or cafeteria, he brings lunch
from home and eats at his desk. He must be arm-twisted to make even the
briefest appearance at important agency functions.

“He is very reserved, very aloof,” Mrs. ElBaradei said recently over
tea in their apartment, filled with rugs from Iran and the awards and
other baubles that come with her husband’s persona as a campaigner for
world peace. “He thinks these diplomatic receptions and dinners are a
waste of time.”

He shares confidences with only a handful of associates. “He doesn’t
have meetings where he seeks input,” said one former agency official,
who like some others would speak about Dr. ElBaradei only on the
condition of anonymity. “It’s, ‘Here’s what I want to do.’ ”

He has become a compulsive name-dropper, diplomats say. “He remains a
shy man, but one who is somehow dazzled by his own destiny,” said one
European nonproliferation official who knows him well. “He’s always
saying, ‘Oh, I talked to Condi last week and she told me this,’ or ‘I
was with Putin and he said this or that.’ He’s almost like a child.”

The eldest of five children from an upper-middle-class family in Cairo,
Dr. ElBaradei grew up with a French nanny and a private school
education. At 19, he became the national youth champion in squash. “You
have to be cunning,” he said of the sport.

His father, a lawyer, was the head of Egypt’s bar association. The son
studied law and joined the foreign service, eventually serving in New
York. Living there in the late 1960s and early ’70s was so
transforming, he said, that today he feels greater kinship with New
York than Cairo, more comfortable speaking English than Arabic.

While working on his doctorate on international law at New York
University, he went to New York Knicks basketball games and to the
Metropolitan Opera, and stayed up late talking American politics and
drinking wine in Greenwich Village bars. His first girlfriend, he said,
was Jewish.

Moving up the diplomatic ladder, he eventually settled in Vienna, where
he became the nuclear agency’s legal counselor and then head of
external relations. His ascent to the top job, in 1997, was a surprise.

After none of the proposed candidates received the needed votes, the
American ambassador to the agency at the time, John Ritch, led a quiet
campaign for Dr. ElBaradei, a close friend. In a cable to Washington,
Mr. Ritch recalled, he said the United States could do no better than
backing “an Egyptian who is a passionate Knicks fan.”

Dr. ElBaradei started out with the modest goal of reorganizing the
agency, which today has about 2,300 employees. Then came Iraq. Before
the war, the Bush administration repeatedly warned of Saddam Hussein
getting the bomb, and called on atomic inspectors to confirm that view.

Instead, in March 2003, Dr. ElBaradei told the Security Council that
after hundreds of inspections over three months, his teams had found
“no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear
weapons program.” And while President Bush charged that Iraq was trying
to buy uranium in Africa, Dr. ElBaradei dismissed the underlying
intelligence as “not authentic.”

The invasion, 13 days later, was “the saddest day of my life,” he said.

Even as American troops found no unconventional arms, the Bush
administration waged a quiet campaign against Dr. ElBaradei and his
agency, barring his inspectors from Iraq and working behind the scenes
to keep him from a third term.

He said he had been “99 percent decided” against running until he
learned that John R. Bolton, then Washington’s United Nations
ambassador, was determined to block him.

Dr. ElBaradei recalled “a sense of revulsion” that such a personal
decision should be made “by anybody else.”

His wife said she had told him, “Mohamed, you run — tomorrow!”

Ultimately, with no candidate of its own and no international support,
the United States backed down.

In October 2005, a month into his new term, the Nobel call came.

Breaking the Seals

The standoff with Tehran entered its current phase on Jan. 10, 2006,
when Iran broke the I.A.E.A.’s protective seals on equipment at its
underground site at Natanz and resumed efforts to enrich uranium.

When the West began imposing sanctions, Iran retaliated by cutting back
on its cooperation with Dr. ElBaradei’s agency and barring dozens of
its inspectors. As the Iranians ramped up enrichment, the agency and
the rest of the world were steadily going blind to aspects of Iran’s
nuclear program.

Dr. ElBaradei himself was humiliated on a rare visit to Tehran in April
2006. Two days before his arrival, the Iranians announced a
breakthrough — industrial-level enrichment.

Still, Dr. ElBaradei hoped to meet the supreme leader of Iran,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Instead, he spent much of his time cooling his
heels in a hotel room.

Critics say Dr. ElBaradei has responded to such provocations by going
soft on Tehran — glossing over its violations, caving to its demands
and writing reports that bend over backward to be conciliatory.

For instance, they say he has added to inspection woes by moving a
half-dozen top investigators off the case, which the agency defends as
normal rotations. The agency’s chief Iran inspector, Christian
Charlier, who spoke out publicly about Iran’s evasiveness, was assigned
to the agency’s Brazil file.

“He’s naïve and idiosyncratic and that amounts to being dangerous,” Mr.
Bolton said. “His argument for years was that he could talk Iran out of
being a nuclear threat. Then it was, ‘O.K., we’ll just let them
experiment.’ Now it’s, ‘You’re never going to get them to give up.’ ”

But Dr. ElBaradei’s supporters say he is engaged in a balancing act
that deals as much with Washington’s excesses as with Tehran’s.

In May, after Vice President Dick Cheney warned from an aircraft
carrier off Iran’s coast that the United States was ready to use its
naval power to keep Iran from “gaining nuclear weapons and dominating
this region,” Dr. ElBaradei offered a quick response: he declared that
Iran had achieved “the knowledge” of enrichment — implying that it was
too late for military action or other Western punishment for refusing
to stop its atomic efforts.

“The fact of the matter,” he said, “is that one of the purposes of
suspension — keeping them from getting the knowledge — has been
overtaken by events.”

His remarks outstripped the analyses of his own inspectors, who were
reporting technical problems at Natanz, and contributed to suspicions
that he was exaggerating Iran’s progress as a political maneuver. Even
so, that argument — that Iran has already crossed an important line —
is the tacit assumption behind the new accord.

The plan, released Aug. 27, sets a firm timetable for Iran to clear up
a half-dozen controversies about past secret activities, while also
improving access for I.A.E.A. inspectors.

The diplomats who marched into Dr. ElBaradei’s office the next day
shredded the plan point by point.

They expressed dismay that the accord, negotiated with no diplomatic
input, omitted any stipulation that Iran suspend enrichment. One envoy
noted that the plan forces inspectors to ask questions on only one
issue at a time, leaving the most delicate topics until the end.

There was general alarm that the document suggested treating Iran like
a “routine” case, instead of a country that had lied repeatedly, and,
according to some governments, harbors a secret nuclear-arms program.

Dr. ElBaradei’s response, paraphrased by a Western official, was that
“all you are doing is being suspicious; the agency cannot judge Iranian
intentions.”

In the days that followed, representatives of other countries hammered
Dr. ElBaradei with sharp criticism. But a week later, many governments
had begun to believe that their strategy was backfiring. They decided
to try to co-opt Dr. ElBaradei rather than isolate him.

The new thinking went like this: he and the Iranians had won this
round. Much of the world would consider the agreement on a timetable a
step forward. By contrast, Western diplomacy was hopelessly stalled.

On Sept. 7, envoys from the four Western powers again visited Dr.
ElBaradei’s office. This time, though, they offered support for his
effort to clear up the past, and said they welcomed his renewed support
in pressing Iran to suspend enrichment and let inspectors conduct wider
inquiries.

“We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that
it would only make him look even more like a hero,” said one senior
European official.

In the interview, Dr. ElBaradei called the shift “a complete change” —
a result of his explaining and “standing firm.” He called his accord a
sound step toward defusing the Iran confrontation.

“I have no qualm that some people have distrust because of Iran’s past
behavior,” he said.

But sanctions alone, he added, would solve nothing. “You need to sit
together and talk about it and try to work out mechanisms to build
confidence.”

And if the Iranians do not keep their promises, he said: “I told them
very openly that it will backfire. Absolutely.”

Weighing the Risks

Early in September, when the agency’s board gathered here in Vienna and
discussed the new plan, the American envoy, Gregory L. Schulte, stunned
colleagues by praising Dr. ElBaradei. He told the board that the deal
was “a potentially important development and a step in the right
direction.”

Even so, diplomats and visitors say that in unguarded moments, Dr.
ElBaradei has expressed the conviction that a lasting accommodation
with Iran must wait until the Bush administration is gone.

The danger, some analysts say, is that by then, Iran might have
acquired the ability to make a bomb. American intelligence analysts put
that date at anywhere from 2010 to 2015.

Even if Iran begins to deliver on its latest promises, Dr. ElBaradei
faces a potential deal breaker. As part of the accord, he is demanding
that the United States give Tehran copies of American intelligence
documents related to suspected secret Iranian military work on nuclear
warheads. As a lawyer, he said, he was determined to give Iran the
access it deserved.

And if it turns out that Iran did, in the past, make secret moves
toward nuclear arms? “Many countries had ambitions in the past,” Dr.
ElBaradei said, raising the prospect that, in theory, Iran, too, might
“have to make certain confessions.”

He added that the most important thing “is for them to come clean.”

Elaine Sciolino reported from Vienna, and William J. Broad from New
York.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times