Global Policy Forum

By Julia Preston

The Security Council meeting had been a multilateral wrestling match among the United States and other major powers, each pressing its interpretation of Hans Blix's report on meetings this week with Iraqi officials. After the session on Thursday, Mr. Blix, the Swedish lawyer who heads the United Nations weapons inspectors, walked out to confront a crowd of shouting reporters. What would happen if Iraq balked at tough inspections, one asked."When did we be1gin to take no for an answer in diplomacy?" Mr. Blix replied with a gentlemanly smile. The response expressed both the style and the convictions of Mr. Blix, who has devoted the past 40 of his 74 years to preventing warfare with the world's most dangerous weapons by means of negotiation. But as his team prepares to return to Iraq in coming weeks, he must be ready to decide when he should take a no from Iraq for the answer.

The pressure on Mr. Blix is already enormous. He has been asked to make plans with Iraqi officials for new inspections while his bosses on the 15-nation Security Council are having a major row about the rules his inspectors should follow. If he returns to Iraq, the start of a United States-led military campaign against President Saddam Hussein could hinge on whether Mr. Blix says Iraq is cooperating with inspections or blocking and cheating. His word could mean war.

Mr. Blix learned his skills during 16 years he spent as the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. He faced down Iraq once before, in 1991, over a secret nuclear program. He engaged in a confrontation over nuclear fuel with North Korea, and he oversaw a toughening in the atomic agency's weapons monitoring.

He also knows what it means to be "the servant of the Security Council," as he calls himself. Experience has taught that he must tread carefully to avoid being seen as partial to the United States or any of the other four permanent members of the Council or, worse yet, soft on Iraq. "He is very meticulous, very lawyerly in the positive sense," said Robert J. Einhorn, a former United States assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. "On one hand he's sensitive to the politics, and on the other to the importance of being perceived to be absolutely objective. "Nobody owns him," Mr. Einhorn added.

Mr. Blix, who was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on June 28, 1928, studied at Columbia University and received a doctorate from Cambridge. He received his law degree in Stockholm and had a successful political career at home, serving as foreign minister in the late 1970's.

He won mixed reviews for his first decade at the atomic agency. The agency gave its approval to Iraq throughout the 1980's, saying there was no sign that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear weapon. But some aggressive inspectors working with the agency in 1991, after the Persian Gulf war, broke out of its polite regimen and forced their way into buildings and documents, catching Mr. Hussein red-handed. Mr. Blix and his agency "almost had to be hit with a two-by-four to realize that Iraq was seriously cheating," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. David Kaye, an American who was on the team that uncovered Iraq's hidden nuclear project, recalled that he once challenged a senior Iraqi weapons official in front of Mr. Blix. He received a scolding from Mr. Blix for confronting "a representative of a state."

But many experts say Mr. Blix learned a hard lesson from that episode. When his analysts caught North Korea trying to make nuclear-weapons fuel in 1992, Mr. Blix turned up the international heat. Finally, the United States stepped in to defuse the confrontation. At the end of his tenure he revamped the agency's safeguards to make inspections more forceful.

Mr. Blix did not volunteer for the Iraqi job, which he took over in March 2000. After the inspections collapsed, when inspectors were barred in 1999 from returning to Iraq, the Security Council considered many candidates. But only Mr. Blix had the right combination of expertise and finesse. He likes to bring a little humor to his task when he can. For many fallow months, Iraq ignored his existence. But after President Bush called on the United Nations to disarm Iraq and new inspections seemed likely, Iraqi officials began to denounce him. "I've gone from a nonentity to a spy," he said with a grin.

He is determined to make his inspections succeed, to make Iraq give up its most lethal weapons, without going to war. "He recognizes that how the United Nations deals with Iraq sets a precedent for the future," Mr. Einhorn said. "He understands the stakes are very high."

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