Strategists in the United States and Iran are now wrestling with a question central to their high-stakes game of nuclear chicken: Who is Yukiya Amano?
At this point, both sides know little more than the contents of his resume: Amano, a Japanese career diplomat, is the successor of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei. After 12 increasingly high-profile years at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), ElBaradei departed the organization at the end of November. Unlike ElBaradei, who took about four years to begin making significant changes as director general, Amano may have to make his own mark at the IAEA very soon, because he will be forced to grapple with a range of challenges ElBaradei left behind: unresolved flashpoints in Iran and Syria, infighting among the staff, and political gridlock dividing the nations that sit on the organization's ruling body, the Board of Governors.
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The world will be watching carefully. Amano was elected this July to succeed ElBaradei as director general by a single-vote majority of the 35-member board. Amano's support came from advanced, largely Western, powers. In throwing their weight behind Amano, these countries aimed to trim back the activist political agenda that ElBaradei had advanced over the last decade.
An early indicator of how far Amano is willing to depart from his predecessor's approach will come in mid-February, when he will finish drafting reports on Iran and Syria for the board.
When it comes to Iran, the United States and some other advanced nuclear powers will push Amano to reverse what they saw as ElBaradei's propensity for dither and delay. The IAEA was aware, as far back as 2002, that Iran was clandestinely pursuing an ambitious uranium enrichment project. By mid-2003, the IAEA had proven that Iran misled the organization for nearly two decades about the scope of its nuclear program. But it wasn't until 2006 that the Board of Governors cited Iran for non-compliance of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), and referred the violations to the U.N. Security Council.
U.S. diplomats representing the Bush administration asserted at the time that ElBaradei failed to uphold the IAEA's standards for compliance in the Iran case, thereby denting the IAEA's credibility. According to IAEA officials, however, the European Union -- not ElBaradei -- was primarily responsible for delays in citing Iran for violations of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Beginning in 2003, EU diplomats tried to solve the budding crisis by trying to cooperate with Iran, promising not to refer the Islamic Republic to the Security Council for possible sanctions if the regime agreed to halt its centrifuge enrichment program. Ultimately, the EU initiative failed.
Some IAEA officials admit that ElBaradei did not embrace diplomatic efforts to sanction Iran. However, they argue that ElBaradei resisted calls to escalate the standoff in order to prevent the Bush administration from going to war. In media interviews in 2007 and 2009, respectively, ElBaradei openly warned of "war drums" beaten by U.S. and Israel officials, "basically saying the solution is to bomb Iran," and asserted that belligerent US policy toward Tehran had prevented resolution of the Iran nuclear issue.
Tension between the United States and the IAEA over Iran persisted until the end of Bush's second term. But as ElBaradei's tenure drew to a close, his approach created rifts even among his own staff in the Secretariat, the IAEA's executive office.
Olli Heinonen, the head of the Department of Safeguards and the man responsible for the Iran probe, was the most prominent dissenter. Heinonen compiled a dossier of information strongly suggesting that Iran had been secretly researching nuclear weapons for years, in parallel with its uranium enrichment program. As Heinonen's confidence in the accuracy of his information grew, he increasingly crossed wires with the small bevy of diplomats in the IAEA's Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination (EXPO). Safeguards officials blamed EXPO for urging ElBaradei to leave data from the damning weapons research dossier out of his reports to the board.
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