Environment : The Ozone Conference: Subtle Nuances in the London Air : The complexity of the issues are enough to baffle the most sophisticated diplomat. The U.N.’s Mostafa Kamal battles to keep a key environmental accord strong.

It was early evening as Mostafa Kamal Tolba hurried across from Buckingham Palace making his way toward Green Park.

“I’ve been meeting all day,” he said as he reached the curb. “And, yes, there is a dinner tonight. I just needed to get out and take a walk.”

Few participants at the just-concluded United Nations conference here begrudged Tolba, 67, a few moments for himself. As executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, he was engaged in a virtual nonstop round of complicated negotiations.

Tolba, they say, is one to “knock heads.” His goal: To strengthen the Montreal Protocol, an international accord to protect the Earth’s ozone layer from further erosion. But, whose heads is he “knocking?”

As the London ozone conference showed, each delegation brings varying degrees of sophistication and understanding to the task.

Richer countries like the United States dispatch a veritable task force to such diplomatic parleys, including scientific experts, diplomats and staff members with extensive expertise with the most confounding minutiae. There are politically savvy delegates sensitive to the ways that subtle nuances in each paragraph of a protocol might affect a country’s national interests or a politician’s fortunes.

Other countries, especially less-developed nations, are not always so well prepared.

All, however, attempt to represent their national interests.

While it is true, for example, that the entire world faces a common threat from ozone depletion--increased cases of skin cancer, cataracts, reductions in crop yields and the disruption of the marine food chain--there were and continue to be both national and parochial interests that had to be addressed.

The complexity of the issue alone is enough to tax the most able diplomat. But, it can be a painful dilemma for the uninitiated.

Typically, according to professional conference watchers, delegates are not scientists, even though science is an integral component of what many are calling a new era of environmental diplomacy. More often than not, they are career bureaucrats and generalists.

“In highly developed countries, it is no problem at all. They are not all scientists, but they know what they’re talking about. That is not always so with less-developed countries,” said Rumen D. Bojkev of Canada, an atmospheric physicist and secretary of the International Ozone Commission, an arm of the International Scientific Union.

There have been cases in which heads of state and their staffs have been ignorant of the most basic provisions of treaty proposals that would directly affect them.

One official with the U.N. Environment Program, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled a 1989 meeting in Brazil called to draft a hazardous waste treaty protecting Third World nations from exploitation by industrialized countries anxious to export their toxic waste.

Shortly before the Brazilian conference, a leading U.N. official went to Africa to confer with leaders there. “He was appalled by the lack of knowledge on an issue they would be deciding in a month,” this source said. The official immediately ordered a simple-to-understand explanation of the hazardous waste accord, stripped of technical jargon, for heads of state.

Yet another U.N. staffer, who also requested anonymity, said many developing countries can hold their own in any bargaining.

“They know what they’re talking about. They’re not junior in the negotiating process.”

Indeed, Maneka Gandhi, India’s environmental minister and daughter-in-law of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, easily fielded questions from the press, exhibited knowledge of the subject and was cagey enough not to tip a negotiating hand.

At times, she would say something and flash a knowing smile at her inquisitors as if they had just shared a private joke.

She became a veritable media star at the London ozone conference. It was easy to spot her from the clusters of reporters, television cameras, lights and tape recorders usually gathered around.

Others, like Julio Santos, deputy head of Brazil’s delegation, states his country’s case forcefully. By his own account, he will speak to a reporter in plain, often undiplomatic terms even though his demeanor in the often rarefied world of multinational negotiations can be quite solicitous.

Before commenting to The Times on a U.S. position that was particularly annoying to him, Santos said: “This is not the way I would speak in negotiations, but to put it bluntly . . . it’s stupid to do that. They are going against their own interests.”

Many thought the Chinese delegation at London would be the last to consent to a press conference in view of the strained relations since the Beijing massacre a year ago. But they were the first.

Wang Yang Zu, deputy administrator of the National Environmental Protection Agency of China, carefully fielded questions, laying down a foundation for his reply and exhibiting a keen sense of subtlety that took the United States to task with a silk glove .

After the press conference ended and reporters were milling about, Wang and at least a half dozen members of his delegation congratulated each other with handshakes, as if they had won a contest.

Among the most informed participants at the London conference were environmentalists and industry representatives. Both routinely make the negotiating circuits and are frequently called on by official government delegates for facts and figures, despite their admitted special interests.

These are part of the cast with which Tolba worked last week to win agreement on major changes in the Montreal Protocol, the ozone-protection accord.

“He pushes and pushes at the formal meetings and then convenes small groups of influential persons and tries to reach a compromise,” said Eileen Claussen, a ranking official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “If he can’t, he puts out the proposal as his own view and takes it up before the full conference. I think he’s a wonderfully effective negotiator,” she added.

Those close to Tolba like to recall an incident in September, 1987, on the final day of negotiations to weld the Montreal Protocol together.

Late in the day, an Austrian diplomat informed the press that negotiations had reached an impasse. “I’m sorry to inform you there will not be a Montreal Protocol. We have failed to agree,” he said.

But even as he spoke, Tolba was upstairs negotiating. Within half an hour, Tolba came downstairs and took a seat in the Austrian’s chair while the diplomat was in the men’s room.

“Gentlemen,” he grinned. “We have a protocol.”

“He can outlast anyone in a negotiating marathon,” said Tolba press aide Paul Ress, a former correspondent with Time magazine. “He was cajoling and pleading and saying, ‘Look, do you want this treaty or don’t you?’ ”

Tolba has other advantages at the negotiating table. First, as an Egyptian, he can speak to delegates from Third World countries as one of their own.

“No American, Frenchman or Brit can get away with what he tells them,” Ress said. At the same time, industrialized nations see in Tolba a pragmatist. “He’s not rabid. He’s no ideologue,” said one participant from the West.

Secondly, Tolba is a scientist by training and well-versed on ozone depletion. At one time he was president of the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology and deputy minister of higher education. He is a microbiologist and botanist.

“He knows the issues cold,” said Richard E. Benedick, who led the U.S. delegation to the Montreal negotiations in 1987. Benedick, currently on leave from the State Department to the World Wildlife Fund, is the author of a soon-to-be-published book, “Ozone Diplomacy.”

The American added of Tolba: “I have seen him at meetings slash--literally slash--major country ambassadors (such as) the Soviets, because they were wrong. He had it cold. He knew it. And then afterwards he embraces them, invites them out for coffee or a drink. The man’s amazing.”