In the interest of reducing speculation about their identities, the editors decided that all sources interviewed for this article should be allowed to remain anonymous. n June 4, 1997, at the end of a closed-door meeting held on the fifth floor of the Vienna International Centre, the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Board of Governors unanimously selected Mohamed ElBaradei as its next director-general. Nine months prior, when Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who had led the IAEA since 1981, told the board he was leaving, its chairman said he would look for a replacement from a developing country. But it wasn't expected that ElBaradei, a shy, circumspect assistant deputy director-general from Egypt, who avoided public controversy and who worked in Blix's shadow for 12 years, would succeed him. Thus, for many months, other candidates were in the spotlight. At the same time, however, little progress was made, as most of the advanced nuclear countries were waiting for the developing states to agree on a single candidate from their ranks. Behind the scenes, the United States discreetly influenced the selection process, and by early 1997, Washington favored ElBaradei. "During the fall of 1996, we were looking in vain for a developingworld candidate we were comfortable with," says a former U.S. official. A key player in Washington's decision to support ElBaradei was U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA John Ritch, who, according to a former U.S. diplomat, told officials at the State Department and Pentagon that ElBaradei "has knowledge, experience, and credibility. He's a guy in whom we can have confidence." But that confidence was short-lived. When ElBaradei steps down as IAEA director-general in November-after three terms and 12 years of service-he will be leaving an agency and position that he significantly changed. Deep disagreements he had with Washington about the Iraq War, the Iranian nuclear program, and, more generally, the conduct of international affairs, encouraged him to depart from the agency's established ways. In fact, on that June day in 1997 when he was elected director-general, few could have predicted how assertive ElBaradei would be in global nuclear affairs over the course of his tenure. "Events can make the man, and that's what happened in Mohamed's case," says one long-time ElBaradei associate. Calm before the storm. Mohamed ElBaradei was born in Cairo on June 17, 1942, just as the world's first clandestine nuclear weapons program was getting started in the New Mexico desert. His mother has described him as having been lauded by his teachers and having been athletic enough to win a national squash championship. Young ElBaradei wanted to be like his father, a respected Egyptian lawyer; as a result, he enrolled at the University of Cairo's law school in the late 1950s. It was an era of revolution, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's ideas of Arab socialism had taken hold of the region. ElBaradei graduated from law school in 1962, amid a wave of decolonization and on the eve of a number of ...